A few years ago at a baseball tournament my son’s team did phenomenally well, and ended up beating a really great team from out of state.
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.
> they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom.
Sorry, this sounds so absurd you can't just leave us hanging to guess what was specifically claimed ;)
In a similar vein, in my family we had a complaint to social care worker that our Grandma (who was immobile in a bed and without verbal contact because of terminal Alzheimer) was improperly taken care of. But as my mom is a nurse who did all the feeding, cleaning 2x a day and installed anti bedsore mattress, no fucking way.
We know 99% that the complaint was from one of the people in the family, as almost nobody else knew or cared what was going on.
We had a complaint like this for my dad when he was near the end.
We got in a verbal argument with a care worker who wouldn't do anything when she came to take care of him, wouldn't feed him, clean him, talk or even look at him. Except for the few times where she screamed at him she just waited for her time to leave. After the argument she sent a complaint letter to the local government claiming he was improperly taken care of (even though we cared for him every day in addition to paying people like her to help).
Here is where it gets good: He was put under care of the state until the matter was resolved, with a state appointed curator who received a percentage of his pension as payment and had full control of all decisions related to his care as well as his bank account.
That meant we could no longer make accommodations in his house without their approval, every decision we took for him had to go through them. We had to pay for the large costs of care ourselves because it's not remotely realistic to go through the government to expense food, hygiene supplies and everything needed to take care of an elderly man near death. In addition to that we couldn't get rid of the agency that provided the abusive care workers, they made sure to make buddy-buddy with the curator and to paint us as abusers.
We went to his home every day to care for him and we would see the care workers just sitting there doing nothing, perfectly aware we were powerless to change anything or even throw them out. Eventually, after months of legal costs and being treated like abusers, we got in front of a judge and we were put back in charge after my dad begged for it. He was very close to the end then and I will always be bitter at how the state and these people conspired to take him away from us and prevent us from getting him better care during his final months.
Pretty sure you were a victim of a criminal nexus that formed to take advantage of the laws, the machinery of the state, and private providers. Just like the (juvie) court-to-prison-pipelines that we hear about every once in a while.
This kind of predatory guardianship is what "I Care a Lot" was based on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot). It's disturbingly frequent in a few states, I forget which, that have the right combination of laws and (lack of) oversight.
Had a terrible problem in the UK with my grandmother, we never got a lasting power of attorney for health, and by the time she needed it it was of course too late. Figured next of kin would be reasonable.
She's been incarcerated in a care home since the start of covid, although rather than one near to where family lived they refused to let us move her. Took 18 months of going through court to get her moved, she has degraded so far she barely remembers me now.
(And of course despite legally being kept in the car home she has to pay for it. Had she broken the law and gone to prison she'd have more freedom and wouldn't have to pay!)
Friend of mine from Bari had the same problem with their old grandma. She (my friend, not the grandma) showed up with a bunch of male friends and told the fake caretaker "Leave by the door or you'll be leaving by the window, either way do not come back". The scammer left by the door and that was the end of it. The grandma died 18 months later in her bed surrounded by her family.
Stuff like this turns me Anarchist in the "Government can't work" sense. The criminals are always 10 steps ahead of (or in cahoots with) the government, turning every attempt at "promoting the general welfare" into highway robbery, and no one in government is willing to prosecute and convict these criminals, because white collar crime gets the "it's too complicated to explain" Get Out of Jail Free card.
I would be lying if I said the situation didn't inspire urges of vigilantism in me at the time.
The government is a very, very scary thing. Because I'm disabled, I've had many encounters with the faceless and all powerful hand of the government, sometimes it feels like they'd want a medical certificate just to allow people like me to keep breathing. But paradoxically, I believe in a fairly strong government, I think it's best to have an organization at the top which is explicitly defined to serve the need of the people, rather than whatever would rise to the top in its stead. As long as one remains aware of how terrifying the government can be and is willing to go out and throw a few bricks at government buildings. I think it's served us well, comparing my country to the rest of the word.
Yeah, agreed. The mistake a lot of individuals make when they fall in the intellectual trap of Libertarianism is that power doesn't care about labels. Sure the state "has a monopoly on violence" but that is not an intrinsic thing. A weak state quickly finds violence being adopted by other centers of power within a society (just look at Haiti). We attempt to concentrate certain powers in government because it's the easiest way to keep those powers in check. In the end you don't want any center of power to get too powerful as it makes systems overall less stable. The best counter for a strong government is strong civic engagement and democratic norms as government is need to act as a counter to private centralized power (both legal and extralegal).
Sometimes the easiest way to keep the powers and check are to simply not grant them to the state. Some problems are better solved by decentralized power, even if it is imperfect and has collateral damage.
Sometimes is a real weasel word here. The unfortunate truth is we can’t trust government, but every other option tends to be vastly worse.
Government contractors introduce horrible conflicts of interest at every level. The US used to get projects done early and under budget before contracting took over, but that doesn’t make anyone wealthy.
Private individuals run into the tragedy of the commons.
Abusive legal guardianships demonstrate we can’t trust individuals not just the government.
So, my point is if you can’t trust people, companies, or the government then what’s left? IMO, the best option is to simply limit the number of things we need to trust. You don’t need to trust news organizations for them to act as a balance on government corruption. That only goes so far, but it’s still useful.
I also agree with limiting the number of individuals or institutions you have to rely on and Trust.
In this case, if durable legal guardianship against the wishes of the ward did not exist, there would be no need to trust anyone, the government or otherwise.
To be clear, what I'm proposing in this case is that nobody can have their assets seized without their permission.
Similarly, I don't have to invest trust in my underwear stain inspector, governmental or otherwise because nobody has the right to stop me inspect my underwear.
There isn’t a trust nobody solution to the guardianship issue. Your solution just means trusting the individual. That seems reasonable on the surface, but results in unpleasantness due to degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's etc. It’s an extremely vulnerable population that constantly get targeted by scammers who prey a people with diminished mental capacity.
To be clear I am not saying government is the right solution, just that the problem does exist. Not just because people get taken advantage of but because taxpayers gets stuck taking care of people who have lost everything.
PS: Being able to trust children is one solution that works at the individual level, but it unfortunately doesn’t scale.
Arguing about the ethics is one way to shape policy, but it doesn’t make problems disappear.
Every day people do lose the ability to make informed decisions without preparing for that change. How and why we respond to that doesn’t change the underlying biology.
In my province, rooms in long term care homes are (apparently) on some level, legally like a place of residence. Even though they exist in a public or private facility. Some families have caught on to this fact and installed cameras and audio recording equipment in their elderly parent's rooms. The staff don't like it but there isn't a whole lot they can do about it since it's the private property of the residents, in their residence.
What a terrifying experience. This goes into my growing list of reasons why it pays to just take note of negative people's behavior, and quietly terminate their contract without ever discussing anything with them.
Businesses learned this a long time ago, which is why they never tell you why they get rid of you. They just say your services are no longer required.
This is horrific and is caused by the pride of those who are too lazy to lift a finger. Just know that bitterness will only poison you from the inside out. Don't allow this to fester or it will make you like them. I have seen the effects of this in my own family and it ends in evil.
I'm sorry about the effect it's had on your family, these are hard things to bear.
I've started praying again last year, and generally trying to live according to the kinder values of Catholicism but it's a work in progress.
The person who doesn't properly care for your dad, complains that he's not properly cared for, and thereby ensures that he gets worse care? That is backwards in every possible way. How is any of that shit legal?
My daughter was having a very bad day, very pouty and whiny. Around age 8 or so. My wife had put her in a timeout, and then our daughter kept “needing” to go to the bathroom over and over again (usually to play in the sink). Fed up with this, my exasperated wife force marched her to the bathroom with her hand on her back to ensure she went to the bathroom and wasn’t loitering about playing.
A parent from the other team was sitting in our group and disapproved loudly of the timeout and the forced bathroom match, she almost certainly was the one who complained.
I have a 3 year old. She hates going to bet and was having a tantrum for a while last night. She’s smart and figured out we will take her out of the bedroom if she says she has to pee pee. After 4 times of playing around in the bathroom and only one time actually using it she finally went to bed after asking me to adjust the covers 30 times.
All of this is normal kid stuff. What kind of parent is so spiteful they will call child services on an opposing teams parents?
It was a NJ/NY tournament with a lot of rivalry and prestige for the winners.
Some parents get very, ridiculously caught up in the excitement of their kids' sports, and a very small number go too far. I have seen parents fighting in the stands at 10U football games (10 and under). I have heard parents screaming at coaches threatening to sue them. I have seen parents mocking and degrading the opposing team's kids. I have seen parents encouraging taunts and chants from the crowd to throw off a pitcher or a quarter back. I've seen a nasty, abusive man ejected from a high school building entirely for cursing and screaming at opposing kids. And of course we had CPS called on us.
It's only a very small percentage, but they really ruin the experience for everyone.
It's even less serious stuff than this that has me thinking kids' involvement in those leagues isn't net-positive. But I'm sure there are more positive experiences than negative. And I'd probably think differently if I was super competitive or more sports-oriented.
Small keyboard + autocorrect is just stupid. I have the same issue, and I still regularly miss typos even though I try to QC before posting. Either that or mini-strokes.
At least this was funny and easy to understand, sometimes I’m careless and it’s such complete gibberish if I come back to the comment an hour later I don’t understand what I wanted to write.
Not sure about STT (TTS is reading out articles, etc) but when it comes to autocorrect, Google seems worse. Any time a seeming typo starts getting common, I nearly always recognize it as an Android thing. Maybe Apple's autocorrect doesn't try to change your words, but Google constantly does. Just a few weeks ago the big one was changing `lets` to `let's`, to the point that I changed my wording and just used `allows` to avoid making corrections. I will see a number of posts on Reddit and occasionally here on HN with this mistake. It seems to have stopped for me around last week, but I expect a different common word will be butchered soon.
This is an N=1 story. There are 7-8 billion people on earth, 300 some million in the US, I forget how many in Europe (you can measure Europe, EU, NATO, and get different results and different cultures). With that many people there will always be someone doing something unbelievable stupid, and hackernews is large enough that you are likely to hear about it.
Be careful that you don't try to extrapolate a few N=1 stories into how normal people act.
I don’t share this concern about over-estimating this bad behavior. Yes, normal people don’t do this. But there are a lot of people who take advantage of other people, leverage authority (their own, or others), and even tell themselves that they’re doing the right thing. That’s not super uncommon. And true scammers aren’t super rare.
It makes you wonder what the appropriate level of cynicism is though. I assume you mean N=1 in an order of magnitude sense. But one person saw these kids and phoned it in. A cop returns the kids home with a warning. 3 more cops show up the next day and arrests the man only (but both parents should be negligent should they not???) and then some social workers appear.
How many people heard about this and decided to waste time and resources either wilfully or unwittingly, and is that a reflection of the state law enforcement and social services?
Many (most?) states have mandatory reporting laws. People in certain positions (doctors, teachers, social workers, etc.) are required to report even an inkling of suspected abuse. I'm sure multiple people in the chain knew this was nonsense but none was willing to put their own career and/or freedom on the line for it.
I'm glad it worked out for you. If anyone finds themselves in this situation, please do not talk to protective services without a lawyer. Treat it like you're talking to the cops who are investigating you.
They can make your life hell and take your children away. They do it for things as minor as possessing marijuana in your home, and they do it every day to people who are poor. You just don't hear about it because those stories don't make it into the news.
Hi. I'm Lenore Skenazy. I wrote that article and run Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence, which grew out of the Free-Range Kids movement. (I wrote Free-Range Kids.) At Let Grow we are working to change state neglect laws so they clarify that neglect is ONLY when you put your kid in serious, obvious and likely danger -- not ANY TIME you take your eyes off them, or anytime someone doesn't like your parenting style. Four states have passed these "Reasonable Childhood Independence" laws and five states are considering them this year. Find out more (and, if you'd like, help out) at LetGrow.org . Click on "Advocacy."
Not as bad as your story, but my wife drove to our local community center parking lot, with our infant in the back. She got out of the car and started talking to a friend about 20 feet from the car (windows down, not hot). Another woman called the police complaining that the kid was in the car unattended. They came and threatened to get CPS involved. In the end nothing happened, but it was scary how the situation escalated so quickly.
I am so sorry that this happened. People love to feel like THEY care more about your own kid than you do. And the problem is: with cell phones it is almost effortless to get the authorities involved. LS (I wrote Free-Range Kids and run the nonprofit Let Grow)
Thanks. I haven't read your book but glad you bring awareness to this issue. We never put limits on how far our kids could roam. The farthest they would pedal, was the mall about four miles away. Only thing I ever feared were cars so most of our instruction was around being safe around traffic.
The insidious aspect of doing something like this is that there’s no way of knowing who made the report, and there seems to be no repercussion for making frivolous or false claims, otherwise you could retaliate against them
in the same way.
A few days ago, CPS had to get involved because somehow an eight year old ended up in the middle of a highway. Cops showed up first and shut down the highway to safely extract the kid. CPS got to bring the kid back to the parents.
Have you seen cops? Cops know one thing -- doing violence. They are already terrible at handling folks with mental health needs, folks who aren't neurotypical, folks from other countries or cultures... I don't want them anywhere near kids.
From what I understand, police officers in the US do not receive nearly the level of training that they receive in other countries. And much of the training they do receive is indeed about shooting.
Society tends to observe almost any mistake of parents as reasons to remove children.
24/7 surveillance of children is an unreasonable expectation. Yet if there is any lapse observed, no matter how minor, it's an investigative offense. There is little understanding for parents. Not many people are parents these days, and if they are frequently they only have experience with one or two children in a world where every child can be quite different.
When CFS shows up, you are mostly at the mercy of the org. I've called attorneys and they kind of throw their hands up with a "not much they can do attitude". There isn't much due process except what exists internally to the org. When they make mistakes there is effectively no recourse except going public and shaming them in the media - which is not generally effective BTW.
Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can be life altering dramatic. Yet they can do it without judicial oversight. The places they put them aren't guaranteed to be superior. Even if a child experiences some abuse they may also experience love in a home. Foster homes are also actually more likely to be places of abuse - https://www.focusforhealth.org/sex-abuse-and-the-foster-care...
So the metaphor that comes to mind is you are potentially removing a child from a pan, maybe not even a hot pan, and likely throwing them into a fire. To make that step you had better make 100% certain in triplicate that you are correct. And that bar is not met by the current system.
I'm not really sure how to convey a lifetime of experience as a parent and personal dealings DCFS and what is and isn't good for children. Children are, nearly universally, better off with their actual parents if those parents want them. Even when those parents demonstrate pretty egregious failings. Unless there is really solid proof of physical danger to their life directly from the parents or sexual abuse, it should be hands off.
The foster system just isn't good enough to justify anything else.
Yeah 99% of people that complain about other peoples child. If you actually turn around and tell them you'll sign over the adoption to them and you just need the countersignature, they would shit bricks. They want all the veto rights with none of the personal responsibility -- the essence of entitlement.
> Society tends to observe almost any mistake of parents as reasons to remove children.
This really varies from location to location (and definitely varies based on race/ethnicity and culture of parents). Where I am there is such a shortage of foster-homes that they really push for in-home services over removing the child.
The only near-universal thing that will get a child removed is if the child themselves directly report physical abuse.
> Which brings is to harm. Removing a child from a home can be life altering dramatic.
Agreed; if the child wasn't traumatized before being removed from their home, they definitely are afterwards.
> Even if a child experiences some abuse they may also experience love in a home.
In my experience neglect is actually far worse for the child than physical abuse (though it's not like abuse is sunshine and rainbows). Each child is different, but given a child who was beaten for minor infractions and a child who was often left strapped in a car-seat for an entire day with a sippy-cup and a box of cereal, I'd wager on the latter having more issues.
Sexual abuse has its own, separate set of issues that this margin is too narrow to contain...
> This really varies from location to location (and definitely varies based on race/ethnicity and culture of parents). Where I am there is such a shortage of foster-homes that they really push for in-home services over removing the child.
Let me distinguish CFS desires from society. I've lived in well to do areas to poor areas to relatively lawless areas in the United States. In all of them, with some variance (rich are the worst), you will get reported for the smallest of infractions.
A few of my personal least favorites. Feeding your child goat milk (I kid you not). For a 2 year old toddler who dislikes clothes stripping while outside while parents chase them down. For having a child home during school hours, like ever. Letting a sleeping child sit in a car's car seat for 30 seconds to go back into a building/house for a small item.
Just the tiniest of perceived infractions and it's a report.
Then there are the falsified revenge-reports. Gas company did bad work and they had to come out and fix it, revenge report an unsuitable state of the house. Neighbors don't like xxx... Etc...
CFS doesn't care about all of this. Sometimes they do some of it. But this is often what kind of stuff is in their dossiers.
> In my experience neglect is actually far worse for the child than physical abuse
I generally agree here. And parents are far more likely to shove a phone or tablet at their kids than spend a few hours listening to them and their joys and concerns. You just can't fix this with an outside agency.
> it shouldn't be a secret that foster homes are the most dangerous homes for kids.
Most families are good to their children. Foster homes only get the worst: most kids never go to a foster home. That means kids that are harder than normal to care for and thus their parents are also also going to get frustrated (in fact they often have: many kids in foster homes the parents just need a break), and in turn means the foster parents will face the situations where they are more likely to lose their temper in a bad way - but the real parents have likely done the same. There are also kids who are abused by their parents, and that abuse is likely to make those kids worse than normal kids.
As a parent I can assure you that taking care of normal kids is hard. I know other foster parents: enough to know that foster kids are even harder. Most foster parents are doing the best they can, but the job is a lot harder than normal kids.
Most foster families are loving, but it's interesting to note in these situations where the parent/guardian is paid from outside the household for the children (foster or child support) we see increased rates of abuse. Correlation does not imply causation but there seems to be a heavy correlation between being paid for the child and abuse.
These agencies were instituted on public demand to reduce abuse at a societal level, and their missions were constituted with those harms in mind - hence the obviousness of those agencies being vital, at least at the time when they were instituted, with plenty of evidence back then for their necessity [1]. If they are no longer meeting those mission parameters and causing more harm than good, then we should demand evidence for that as well, should we not?
Anecdotal, but I think I mentioned our kids were adopted. We adopted through the State, and underwent 6 months of training before being approved.
The stories of abuse and neglect were hair raising, and our kids had their own fair share before they came to us.
CPS exists as an alternative to cops doing this kind of work. When done right, they are compassionate and understand how to deal with kids in a variety of sm high stress situations. They do evaluations. They take kids out of homes safely. They do transport to foster care or elsewhere. They evaluate potential adoptive families.
When all done right. We know some fabulous workers doing incredibly hard work here.
We also know it’s easy to abuse the system, and they could use a lot more checks and balances.
Evidence to back what 'seems'? GP was effectively asking for evidence; your response is to ask for evidence that it's not 'obvious' and that they need evidence?
Sorry you had to go through that. I am having a hard time thinking of a way how someone could walk their child to the bathroom wrong. Could you share some more details if you are comfortable?
The problem with trying to punish people for false complaints is that disincentives to reporting child abuse is probably not worth the annoyances. By the time it transitions from a mere annoyance (having to talk to someone from the CPS for an hour and that's it) to something much more impactful (someone producing enough fraudulent evidence that you are arrested and put on trial) they've moved away from merely abusing a reporting system and into full-blown felonious behavior that will not be ignored!
Kudos to my wife for explaining this to me after she told how a coworker teacher of hers was being harassed by a parent who had called CPS in retaliation for some nonsensical disagreement about (is there a pattern here?) kids on a school sports team. I was angry! I wanted that parent to be punished! But my wife is right.
Probably for the insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish false reporting because it will somehow disincentive reporting actual abuse. Initiating a CPS investigation can be incredibly traumatizing for both the parents and the children, and due process can take months or years in the event the initial investigation ends in an incorrect decision to remove the children. This story is proof that even if the police aren't involved (or drop their involvement) CPS is its own entity and their investigations are not just having a chat for an hour. Multiple meetings, interviews, over the course of weeks or months.
False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
You know what, re-reading what I wrote I can see why... honestly, I'm mainly parroting my wife's argument because she's the one who talked me off the ledge few weeks ago.
Here's what she/I meant (she's also super annoyed that I'm bothering her with "nerds fighting about nonsense on the internet"):
The gist of her argument and paraphrased: "The problem is that CPS is by necessity anonymous. It's not that people aren't being punished for reporting false claims, it's that if you really wanted to catch everyone who was reporting false claims then you would have to make them present some form of identification. What if this is about a legitimate case of abuse from a scary motherfucker? Someone might not report because they don't want to realistically be murdered by said scary motherfucker. Also, the communities that have the most problems with child abuse also have a higher number of people who do not want to interact with law enforcement for a number of reasons. There is a trade-off with any situation that requires anonymous reporting."
> insane suggestion that we shouldn't punish false reporting because it will somehow disincentive reporting [...] False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
Jesus, jail time! I can tell you right off the bat that that would absolutely disincentivise me from reporting anything - some process I'm not privy to decides it was a 'false' report and I get jail? That makes for a very high bar for me not to wind my neck back in - and if that's what you want, only something that's too heinous to ignore gets reported, fine. But it's certainly not an insane suggestion that there's a link there.
I'm pretty sure the bar for proving a report was made in bad faith would be much higher than the bar for proving there is abuse happening.
I'm not arguing that people who are wrong in good faith be punished, just that we punish people who we can prove lied in order to retaliate against people they don't like.
Not really. The bar (at least in the US) for convicting someone of false accusations is just the same as any other crime.
The difference is the police won't go after false reporting often, probably because they are worried it will have a chilling effect on people talking to them.
If 10% of murder convictions are mistaken it would stand to reason that the false accusation conviction error rate would be equally high or higher.
It's fun to say, punish everyone that does crime X. But you have to accept a false positive rate.
Right but I don't want to risk someone thinking I'm lying, if it comes with such a cost to me, and ignoring the perceived problem has no cost to me whatsoever (just potentially to the observed child if, I'm right) - unless it was so shocking that it was both deeply affecting and also surely obviously not a lie anyway.
It shouldn't, but it will. What happens when you report the bare facts as you see them, you are accused of lying, a jury is convinced, and you go to jail? That's a foreseeable outcome, and an effective deterrent.
(Whether it's worth that deterrent is a question that I am not going to attempt to grapple with on a technology message board.)
Ok, so this is just a case of something that a primarily male demographic between 19-35 and a background in STEM agree with... which was also my initial, emotionally charged reaction!
Meanwhile, the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.
> the conversation amongst the staff at the public school my wife works at came to a different conclusion. They seem to be a better representation of society in general.
That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.
My son's elementary school is more like a prison now, after a huge transformation in the last two years, and I can't wait for him to move up to the middle school. Which thankfully isn't quite so authoritarian. Yet. I'm right on the edge of pulling both kids out of school and going online with it, and probably would have except my daughter really didn't fare well during the pandemic version of online school. My son would be quite happy though. Make it self-paced and he'd have his high school diploma at 12.
> That's the saddest thing I've read this morning, assuming it is accurate. For every great staff member at school, I've met at least one other than was barely able to function in adult society. I don't know which direction the causal effect is going, but there's a correlation between working all day with young children and being able to relate to other adults.
maybe i'm confused. are you saying it's sad that staff members at an elementary school aren't for punishing false reports to cps? i don't know what's sad about that. if reports are anonymous, how could you punish a false reporter? and how could you prove the report was intentionally false? seems like you'd catch a tiny portion of malicious reporters that for whatever reson left undeniable evidence of that intention to falsely report, and to do that the reporting would have to no longer be anonymous, which would stop a lot of people from reporting.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that public schools are a local monopoly in many cases, and as a result they can swing into bad areas unchecked.
In our case the County Superintendent is supposed to monitor the local districts, but ours refuses to. He is just window dressing. Local superintendents know this and have carte blache.
We ended up pulling our kids and sent them 40 minutes away to private schools. When we pulled them both had B averages, but scored in the 20th percentile on State tests. Entering private school both had horrible first semesters as the learning deficit became clear. Luckily they are both smart (just ignorant, thanks to the prior school) and are catching up.
False reports, especially those used for retaliation, should be a felony and result in jail time.
I feel that what you are saying is true, but I know that this would result in a system where the wealthy and connected would then run amok while their honest accusers sat in prison.
How about if we instead simply make the investigation process less threatening and terrifying, particularly at initial stages? For example, in the linked article, it's insane that the investigator required that the mother return to therapy because she'd been to therapy in the past for a bout of depression.
I get what you're saying. And what I don't mean is the proverbial domestic violence situation where as soon as the police are involved, somebody is getting arrested no matter what.
But in instances where someone has incontrovertibly made a false report because they wanted to ruin someone's day (or life), that should follow them around. There is a large blurry area between reporting someone because their kid has a black eye every couple months and reporting someone because their kid is better at baseball than yours where you can't prove bad faith, and in that instance it doesn't make sense to ruin anyone's life.
1. There's a case to be made for anonymous reports which the current system allows and your system wouldn't allow. Abusive parents can also be violent parents, it's understandable that in some cases teachers or people who know about the abuse going on wouldn't want to report that abuse.
2. This also reverses the current issue with CPS where a report leads to an investigation that's traumatising for the family and the children that CPS is supposed to protect. If you investigate any report to prove that the report was made in bad faith, then anyone reporting will potentially have to go through a process that's traumatising even if they are not guilty.
I think instead snozolli's solution of making CPS' investigations less threatening and more humane with an expedited process when there was clearly a misunderstanding and creating laws that make it clear that certain behaviors are not negligence would go a long way toward solving all this.
> Initiating a CPS investigation can be incredibly traumatizing for both the parents and the children, and due process can take months or years in the event the initial investigation ends in an incorrect decision to remove the children.
The actual problem, with the responsibility being laundered by placing it on random busybodies. Maybe have a system where anonymous denunciation doesn't lead to trauma and misery.
It seems to me that you are being unfairly downvoted. At some point there has to be a balance between punishing provably false reports, punishing (or not) good-faith false reports, and not discouraging true reports. This kind of balance is something that folks in AI need to take into consideration when deciding model performance (ROC curves), but it gets a lot more complex in real life because now you need resources to distinguish between false-reports, good-faith-false-reports, true-reports etc which easily veer into territories of determining intent and downstream harm.
If those resources do get allocated, there's a good chance these same folks downvoting you would complain about wasted government resources because the nuance in allocating those resources doesn't shine through in obvious ways.
What's the solution to this? I don't know, unfortunately. AI scientists have to take every problem that involves this nuance on a per-case basis and work with their business partners (or whoever the "client" is) to decide what's a good point on the curve for the operational model. Similarly social scientists (and politicians) influencing government operations presumably have to determine where that balance lies. And likely the downvoters don't have those answers either. Maybe the real solution is to have a not-too-complex-or-lengthy redress mechanism for those caught unfairly in the "system", with the ease-of-redress driven by how far to one side or other the balance tips.
Don't talk to state workers. Same as don't talk to the police. Anything you say cannot be used to help you in court, it is heresay. It can only be used against you. The interviews are to determine if the DA has enough evidence to prosecute you and if human services meets the vague requirements to steal your kids.
What's bizarre to me is how common both these sort of stories are, but also stories of American parents beating their kids as if that's a normal thing. Where are these child protection services in cases of actual child abuse?
This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips. In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society. There should be quick and immediate recourse against police officers acting like this. No police officer should feel safe or beyond swift reproach when making comments like the ones in this article, yet there is absolutely no justice available for those affected. Even in a best-case scenario where charges are dropped a few days later, this is the psychological equivalent of a home invasion, and attempted kidnapping of their children. Dropping charges is not justice. Those officers should lose their jobs (but won't, because Killingly, like all of the 'Quiet Corner' is a complete boys club), and everyone involved in the decision tree should be heavily scrutinized. The town should issue a public apology. And whoever may or may not have called 911 should be publicly berated.
This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.
I'd recommend people skip the article and go directly the advocacy site it links to and affect change locally. The event happened in 2019, involves the typical dumb ACAB trope and then is swept away.
They most likely dropped charges because it was an unlawful arrest and the parents could have sued and most likely won. When the DA found out they most likely shut the whole thing down.
I think a lot of folks in the US don't realize that even some (some!) countries we think of as authoritarian feel freer, day to day, than the US does, let alone other liberal democracies.
We have elections... but having some wine at your picnic in the park may get you a citation.
We have elections... but, this article.
We have elections... but civil forfeiture.
We have elections... but you'll spend tons of your "free" time fighting with our healthcare system, should you ever actually need to use it. Ditto the time and contortions required to navigate our benefits systems if you ever hit our "social safety net". In either case, you're not gonna be feeling all that "freedom".
We have elections... but an LOLWTF-high incarceration rate.
We have elections... but are constantly scared shitless of civil litigation and liability and there are rules and disclaimers posted on every flat surface.
We have elections... but no mandatory annual leave, with the result that for most people 2 weeks off a year is considered decent. How many people feel "free" at their job?
But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)
Valid points but a lot of frustrations and injustices you hear about in the USA are told by our own press because freedom of press. We are a very transparent people. This is not the case for other places.
My brother lived and worked in China for many years as a professional photographer and basically made the same points as you when we would ask him about what life is like over there. That was until he fell under suspicion at some point because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time taking pictures. He was under house arrest for over a year. They confiscated his passport but eventually let him leave because of Covid. He had zero due process. It was decided by the local police that he should be under house arrest. My family hired a lawyer but he had to present the lawyer to the police as a "concerned family friend who lives in China".
That anecdote is relatively tame compared to what some people go through in authoritarian countries. If the government targets you in one of those countries, your life is over with near zero chance of getting out of trouble.
Sure, I wasn't trying to be all "rah, rah, authoritarianism!" in my post (though several posters seem to have taken it that way, so maybe I wasn't clear enough). My point was more that our notions of freedom can sometimes be rather myopic, and miss the forest for the trees, such that we can become so un-free that even (some!) authoritarian states can feel much freer (until, as you note, you piss off the wrong people, which is obviously a huge problem—or you happen to be of the wrong ethnicity, or wrong religion, et c.—I am not trying to defend authoritarianism).
That's a easy one because it's mentioned often but
I guess my question is how do you know the US is less free than other countries? What if you are being manipulated to feel anger at the government?
Yes, they helped us find the "lawyer" and told us based on their experience that it was very likely he would spend time in a Chinese prison regardless of guilt or innocence. He got lucky in one sense because this was right before Covid hit. When everything started going a little crazy over there because Covid was spreading, they decided to let him leave for whatever reason.
There's no element of this story that couldn't have happened in the US, and no reason presented to believe that your brother wasn't involved in something shady under Chinese law, other than the fact that the situation was resolved in his favor.
That might sound worse than US but is it? If the government here targets you, you end up with a felony record and at that point your life is effectively over as well even if you don't go to prison.
Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.
Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.
This is true for the vast majority of states, and the vast majority of people's interests. The political systems in this country have been shaped by -- and frankly, designed by -- by wealthy interests to make the US an oligarchy with various performances of democratic representation.
I’m not sure that’s the reason why it’s only worth campaigning in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and some other states during presidential elections.
Also it is the system that was designed over 100-200 years ago. The problem is the lack of meaningful reform because the people in power are there only because of the current system.
That’s the reason why is it so hard to change electoral system without some external/internal shock. And “unfortunately” US has been way too stable politically during the 20th century compared to most other countries.
> Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.
That's the case of every state which is away enough from swing. Only "purple" states[0] matter during presidential elections.
Then again, swing states only get pandered to for a few months every 4 years.
[0] and Maine and Nebraska which use district voting, but at 4 and 5 electors they're to small to really matter
This is the exact opposite of my experience. It's the only place where my elected officials were actually engaged. I received regular updates from my representatives without even asking for them. They just mailed all of their constituents flyers explaining the current issues and how it affects the community. I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California. Go figure.
> I've lived in 5 different states and never saw anything like this in any of them except California.
I live in Texas, around Houston. Here we certainly do have representatives (but not members of the Senate) who send mail to constituents with information. Our Senators send emails once in a while, if you sign up for them.
But good luck ever figuring out the real information from the spam and ~~malicious dis~~incorrect information and opinions.
>Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.
Isn't that partly their fault? If you're always going to vote for one party regardless of what they or the other party does, of course neither party is going to bother catering to you. It's kind of like declaring that you will always buy apple products, then complaining that apple doesn't address your grievances.
That doesn’t follow. A similar proportion of electors in swing and non swing states could have fixed voting patterns. The only difference in California is that the proportion of fixed electors for each party is further from 50%.
That is, it might be the case that only 10% of electors in any state are ever prepared to change their mind, but the ones in Ohio get more say than the ones in Cali.
I think it makes perfect sense. Presumably, if one made the declaration (as many have) that for the rest of their life they’ll always and only vote Democrat, it wouldn’t be in the party’s best interest to cater to that voter’s preference, since that vote is already secured. Much better politics to focus their campaigning and policies on the more marginal voters who are undecided or may not vote at all.
I’ve heard Americans lament about this exact concept and coming from Canada I don’t know what the solution. Sometimes I think Ross Perot was the country’s last shot at anything but the present status quo.
In other words: California has promised to disenfranchise its own voters even more than is already the case. I can already see this backfiring spectacularly with a solidly-blue state like California being on the hook to put its electors toward a Republican popular vote winner.
The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.
Right now, effectively, the land votes, and the people's vote is often ignored. Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.
> The many states that have agreed to this (have passed the bill) have simply accepted that the votes of the people is worth more than the feelings of the billionaires who have sponsored the Republican gerrymandering movement.
More like that the votes of people outside their state matter more than the votes of their own people. Nothing weird about that being recognized as the disenfranchisement that it is.
> Wisconsin is a good example, where the Republicans keep losing the vote, but yet with less than 50% of the vote, they somehow have a super-majority in the legislature.
The Electoral College - and this compact of states pertaining to it - has precisely zero impact on any legislative branch, federal or state. It solely pertains to presidential elections (and in turn the rest of the Executive Branch).
The solution to the problem you describe would be to address gerrymandering and other instances of geographic electoral manipulation.
It's not weird when it reflects the reality of the situation. It's the same reason we say voting third party is throwing your vote away. It's important to have more voices heard but in our first past the post system, voting for a candidate who can't get anywhere close to a third of the votes simply doesn't matter.
I haven't read the bill but if certain states are committing themselves to popular distribution of their electoral votes while the red states stick to all or nothing, the reality is that 40% of CA's electoral votes go red and blue candidates don't have a chance at winning.
The bill only applies when states representing 270 electoral votes adopt it. Since 270 votes determine the winner of the EC, it doesn’t matter at all what the remaining states do. The states that sign on would be required to put their votes towards whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, effectively ending the electoral college in all but name. There’s not really much to criticize here if you believe that electing presidents by popular vote is a good idea.
Yes, it's hard to imagine that actually being executed without a ton of lawsuits. And you think people didn't accept the results of the last election, you haven't seen anything...
maybe, but according to the same Constitution that creates the existing system, this should be perfectly legal. Ultimately each state gets to send Electors for the President on its own terms.
However: several Supreme Court justices have signed on to the “independent state legislature” theory, a radical and unsupported interpretation which holds that state legislatures can’t be restricted in how they pick electors (even by their own laws and constitution.) I assume that if states actually adopted the NPV act, the court would instantly bypass it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_state_legislatur...
Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests. You vote for a candidate as a whole, but there are likely still issues you disagree with. Voters' interests are largely unaddressed or ignored altogether.
> Not the point of this thread. Popular vote has nothing to do with how responsive or attentive a government is to voter's interests
Actually, it does: more specifically, degree of proportionality does, and antimajoritarianism (systems in which an absolute majority-preferred option can lose to a minority option) are an extreme case of nonproportionality. Having a powerful central executive elected by nonmajoritarian election itself weights the government to nonresponsiveness (though the US has many other factors reinforcing that.)
That's true recently. But only recently have political alignments been so rigid and predictable in the United States. California went for the Republicans from 1968–92, and before that was somewhat swingy.
More generally, any single-winner election system is prone to a "Rawlsian compromise": something that works out well for 51% of people and poorly for the other 49%. This still isn't so bad if things are changing now and then. But we've been stuck with Clintonist "preachy" Democrats and Gingrichite "edgy" Republicans for nearly my whole life.
The federal government does far too many things, and that's really the problem. The constitution spelled out what the government was allowed to do and that limitation died in the progressive era.
Yes well the progressive era was truly terrible. Food safety, environmental protection, monopolies etc. are really not something the Federal government should have any right to intervene in. After all the states had no issues handling all the before.. obviously…
A lot of good things happened (could add womens suffrage too) but there was also supreme court endorsement of eugenics (Buck v Bell 1927).
Then Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act during WW1. In Schenck v US and Debs v US, the supreme court upheld convictions (first for the crime of distributing literature arguing the draft was illegal, and second just for hinting that the US shouldnt have joined the war).
You might be interested to learn about Washington, DC, a region which is literally disenfranchised despite having more residents than two states. Residents can vote for president but have no voting representation in the House or Senate.
The solid red and blue states influence what kinds of candidates can make it to the general election at all. California and the other large, blue states also have significant influence in Washington between elections.
They aren't disenfranchised. Everyone knows which way California will go so they don't spend a lot of time campaigning there. Candidates have a limited amount of time and money. So they focus on the swing states. My state also votes pretty consistently and therefore doesn't get much campaigning. I don't feel like I am disenfranchised for it.
And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
If you switch to a pure popular vote then the nation would be run by a handful of mega cities like NYC, LA etc. That's not democracy. The system we have prevents that while still allowing for populous areas to matter. Getting rid of the electoral college would remove one of the main compromises our federal system is built on and in my opinion would be fair grounds for any state to secede. It would be comparable to throwing away parts of the Bill of Rights.
> And for everyone who is crying about the popular vote, there is a very good reason we don't do that. It was recognized from the start that if you do a strict popular vote. the more populous and wealthy areas would always call the shots and would dictate politics to the rest of the nation. At the time that meant Virginia. But it doesn't really matter who, the principle still holds. This was a compromise between populous areas and rural areas in order to get the union formed.
The original intention was not this bloc-voting crap. The idea was that a state would select some trusted, wise, and ideally educated, locals to go get a look at the candidates and vote on their behalf, since expecting everyone in a whole country the size of the US to get any meaningful sense of the candidates, or to understand many of the relevant issues in order to make an informed choice, was obviously crazy in a time before broadcast (and still is, actually; broadcast barely even helped with the core problem of most folks—justifiably!—knowing almost nothing about the things a head of state deals with).
This broke down instantly, as electors began pre-declaring for candidates. But we kept the system, which, while a half-decent (if hopelessly poorly-implemented) idea originally, is now simply very bad—we get all the noisy, absurd national campaigning but most of us don't get a meaningful say in the election, anyway.
I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me. Areas don’t dictate anything. It’s people. Why should it matter where the people live? As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.
> As it stands, people who live in smaller states have more say in national politics than people who live in bigger states.
Not for presidential elections, nobody cares about Delaware or Wyoming's 3 electors. Small-population states matter for the Senate where they're way over-represented.
Not that they're not over-represented for the EC mind, but e.g. for their 0.2% of the national population Wyoming has 0.55% of the Electoral College, versus 2% of the Senate. By comparison California's 11.75% of the national population gives them 10% of the EC and... 2% of the Senate.
States which have a say (or are heard really) during presidential elections are states with large enough populations (and thus EC) that it's worth spending time and dumping money there for campaigns, yet purple enough that there's a chance to swing them.
As things stand, where every state votes as a block, the ones where the whole population lands within the 50/50 range is heavily contested. If North Dakota were 50/50 the Bismark media market would be flooded by advertising. Every electoral college vote matters.
The actual number of potentially contested states is quite low; states not in contention aren't contested.
There are many "within the constitution" ways of adjusting this -- states chose electoral college reps as chosen by nation wide popular vote, as chosen by state election ratio, etc. But as things stand, no individual state would do this by itself because an inconsistent implementation would (IE if california or texas stop sending all or nothing electoral college reps) tip the balance to one or the other party for forever.
There's some indications that the republicans won the house in this current election cycle because new york didn't aggressively gerrymander, allowing several republicans to be elected when the absolute math would have made it trivial to exclude them.
Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.
> As things stand, where every state votes as a block
Not every state. Two states (Maine and Nevada) have district voting, so they allocate one elector per congressional district (based on that district’s vote), plus two statewide. Tough they only account for 9 electors combined. And it’s still far from proportional representation.
>> Politics is hard. It's better than mass murder, though, which is the typical alternative.
Weird thing that politics does is convince you that it’s not in control of the mass murder. I promise you we have hundreds of thousands of state sanctioned or willfully negligent deaths annually in <country name of your choice>.
Modern politics isn’t about stopping the deaths, it’s just better at hiding how the sausage is made.
The easiest way to fix this without an amendment would be to greatly increase the number of representatives and use the Maine/Nebraska method to split the electors. It's not perfect, but it would be close enough, depending on how large you make the House of Representative.
It’s not the easiest way to fix this because it makes states which adopt this lose out in the meantime:
- let say you’re a “solid” state (whether red or blue), odds are that’s on both presidential and state (governor, possibly to likely assembly), if you adopt district voting you parcel out EVs to “the other party” without that favour coming back the other way
- if you’re a purple state, then you lose out on campaign presence, money, and publicity, because instead of shifting, say, 10+ EVs getting that extra % popular votes shifts 2 EVs if they’re not in a purple district, 3 if they are
That’s why the NPVIC was designed with a threshold: when the NPVIC covers 270EVs it comes into force and everybody gets the same thing at the same time.
>>I’ve heard this take before and it makes no sense to me.
I’m assuming that’s because you’re not trying to vote in candidates who consistently support a small group of loudly aggrieved people to inflict their will on the vast majority of the country.
The electoral college wasn't created to restrict the power of large states like Virginia.
The electoral college was created because it was expected that state governments would elect the president, not citizens. In the presence of direct election of the president, it's an anachronism at best. It was never about "tyranny of the majority", and in a two-party system, trying to prevent the tyranny of the majority is just a tyranny of the minority.
If you want, weight the votes so votes in small states count more, or votes in rural areas count more. It'll still be a much more fair and equitable system than the electoral college, which effectively means that anyone outside a swing state has no representation.
Of course, doing it that way would make it much more obvious that there's no credible reason we should give 1,000 suburbanites Wyoming more voting power than 1,000 farmers in rural California, or 1,000 voters in Columbus more power than 1,000 voters in Brooklyn.
Even though that gets brought up as a reason very often it is not true. Firstly the US (like many other democracies) has a two house system. The senate is designed to counter balance the power of high population states. Even if the US went to a popular vote system now it would not be governed by california and NY, because the senate gives disproportionate power to smaller states.
If you read historians opinions there are several reasons, the "big States get all the power" is typically not cited [1], however one important reason which does get cited is slavery. The southern states wanted a way to count slaves as population without actually letting them vote. The three fifth rule was the compromise [2 - 4]
Yeah, I guess it's as black and white as you state. There's no in-between like keeping the per state allotments while still having that allotment be chosen by the people instead of adding another layer in between that is "voting for the people", which I provide in quotes because who actually believes that is happening? "voting on behalf of their supporters", at best.
As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked.
>(I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns
Yeah I often imagine myself in the scenario of what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms. I calculated it would take me about 2 weeks to print an FGC-9 and source the various ammo components (by doing things like using primers from nail gun ammo etc this can be done all from unregulated sources).
> As backwards as it sounds my time in near-autocratic 3rd world I've felt the most free. Worst case scenario the police can be bribed for a crisp $20. As long as someone isn't doing some horrible shit (like real violence) a lot can be overlooked.
In the US, flashing a PBA card[0] or the fire department/ambulance alternative will get you out of most of what police consider ‘low-level’ infractions(ie. Covering a license plate, speeding, etc…).
Or in less corrupt cases(like the ones I unfortunately have used mine for), it gets the cops to leave you alone or listen to you when you get profiled for no good reason.
I guess it’s technically not a bribe since no money is exchanging hands, but last I checked, each PBA card raises ~$150/year for the police union.
You should try to live there as an average local person with average income and without "connections". "Crisp $20" in some countries might be quite a lot.
Also: I've seen this many times, foreigners from rich countries get completely different treatment.
I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the end of the day I have to act with the resources I have, not the resources someone else has.
What are we talking about here?
You can power trip (literally and figuratively) as much as you are able. Some countries are good for that.
That doesn't make those countries "freer" as parent comment suggests.
I'm not interested in power-tripping, I'm interested in the people power tripping having the least interest in putting me in jail. Maybe that's because the judicial system allows freedom, maybe it's because the police are lazy or understaffed, maybe it's because they want my money. I'm a pragmatic man.
As for freedom, it's going to be relative. Each person has unique resources and abilities that dictate where they will find the most freedom. You don't have to victimize others to improve your own freedom.
I got downvoted and maybe I misunderstood your response.
I read: "I'm aware of my privilege, but since I have it does it not make sense to use it for my maximum liberty? At the end of the day I have to act with the resources I have, not the resources someone else has."
as I will go to those countries and since 20$ is a crisp change for me I will do whatever I want and pay my way out of it.
> what to do if I ended up in Schengen or something and without arms
I don't mean to be rude, but this phrasing makes you sound like an addict trying to work out if you can smoke banana peel to get high. You can just .. not have a gun for a bit on holiday? Rather than engaging in illegal activities? Heck, several countries have tourist hunting industries! (The tourists do the hunting, not hunting the tourists)
You don’t sound backward. People on the west have been sold on the idea of freedom because they can criticize their politicians. Many third-world “authoritarian” countries have more freedom than the US, however, the general population doesn’t like a ridiculed leader.
Turkey is a much freer country than the US. If the people of Turkey were to enjoy seeing their leader (Erdogan now) being ridiculed, this guy will be showing in circus shows.
And what would you do with that gun? Commit crimes? Even simple possession of it would be a crime. You would not be able to use it to defend yourself without getting prosecuted yourself.
It's not that it's impossible for me to manufacture an illegal gun for myself. What's the point of doing that? I'm not a criminal. I don't plan to overthrow the government or anything like that. Why risk getting a criminal record for no gain?
I'm not pulling out a gun anywhere populated unless the choice is that or I end up dead. In which case prison is an upgrade. I would consider european jail a great chance to read up on the classics while I enjoy not being dead.
Even where I live now (constitutional carry state, extremely lax on guns) pulling from the holster without a threat is gonna get you tossed in prison. Nobody knows you have it until you do that.
Totally, if that's an option that would be a rational choice. For instance, if I ended up in Poland I would buy a black powder revolver and carry that (legal) and if I ended up in Czech Republic or Austria I think the permit is very easy. The pure hypothetical is ending up someplace where it isn't practical to get the permit.
In practice I just live in a place that does not even require a permit.
I think a lot of folks in US over-romanticize those "feel freer" authoritarian countries.
In some cases like this it might be better but I don't think systematic cases of: "inconvenient" people disappearing, being at complete mercy of local oligarch/overlord, inability to leave your country are such rampant in US as in those countries.
Usually people who write something like this never lived in an authoritarian country as a local but were there on a 2 weeks trip or heard it from someone who was on a trip or someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).
I'm not claiming authoritarian states are sunshine and roses, just that freedom is a lot more complex and fuzzier than is sometimes appreciated, and that in some regards we're noticeably less free than some (some!) of those states, despite their being authoritarian. I'm not saying we should switch to being authoritarian in the name of freedom—most other liberal democracies also manage to be freer on several of these issues than we are, though, sure, some are less-free by other measures (but, on balance, I think we're pretty far on the less-free-as-felt-day-to-day-by-most-people side, as liberal democracies go).
People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).
A lot of things were worse, but a lot were better. You're definitely not going to be arrested or harassed for letting your kids walk alone. Not sure how good their record is for actual child abuse (bad cases would make the news, so there was some enforcement).
While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists, and I believe many more were impacted from the latter than prevented from leaving that country.
No one is disputing things can get really bad in those countries. It's more about probabilities. One thing that becomes very clear in the US if you poke around: It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges, and I know plenty who faced them (some convicted). The number of people I knew in the authoritarian country who had a criminal record? Miniscule. Raising my kid here, the chances of him getting a criminal record is significantly higher here than there and is a source of worry.
And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.
And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).
> someone who moved to US (why moving if it is such a great place to live?).
I'll bite too. I grew up and lived for ~25 years in an authoritarian country that was in comparison to others at that time relatively nice. It is now on its way to transform into true democracy.
> It's more about probabilities.
I totally agree.
>People occasionally did disappear (usually temporarily).
As long as its not me - it is ok. Do I read it correctly?
Let me ask a set of questions and I am curious what you'd pick.
>While they could prevent you from leaving the country, they didn't have no fly lists
What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?
>It's ridiculously easy to end up with felony charges...
What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?
>And typically no one has to worry whether they'll find an apartment due to some crime they committed a decade ago.
The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live.
What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?
>And sorry, but no. No local oligarch/overlord. That's orthogonal to authoritarian governments (and is often more about ineffective governments).
That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.
> As long as its not me - it is ok. Do I read it correctly?
To me this is a non-distinction. That reasoning applies in the US as well. As long as the cops are stopping the guys who don't look like me and beating/killing them and not me, it is OK, right?
> What would you take: a higher chance to get on no fly list but still be able to drive to Mexico or Canada and fly from there or leave by boat or lower chance to not being able to leave the country at all for quite some time (potentially ever)?
Given that I personally have known a number of people on the no fly list (which increases my chance of getting on it), but no one in that country who was prevented from leaving, I'll take the latter.
As I said, it's about probabilities.
> What would you take: a higher chance to get felony charges or a lower chance to be in a wrong place and wrong time (killed for fun) with someone who paid their way out criminal justice (that's my explanation of a part of low criminal record)?
In the country I lived in, paying your way out of criminal justice was not something that happened much - I'm not sure if it happens more in the US or not.
Remember: My country is not your country. And do not make the mistake of conflating authoritarian with corruption - these are separate vectors.
And speaking of killing, the homicide rate is much higher in the US (more than triple that country). And if I'm getting killed, I really don't care about the murderer's back story. There's not much to choose here - the US is clearly worse.
Don't conflate authoritarian with high crime.
> The country were I lived a bit earlier would tell you were you can live. What would you take: a higher chance to have problems with apartments search or not being legally allowed to move cities without power tripping local bureaucrat giving you permission?
My country could have had the same problem under certain circumstances. Yet I know more people in the US who have trouble finding apartments for prior crimes (or credit issues, or whatever) than I know people who had trouble moving cities. I can easily see identity theft really screwing up my credit history leading to this problem. Not a concern there. So yes, I would prefer the other country.
> That is how it works, you need to have loyal people in local places. You can call it however you want: mayor of the city, ruling party local political leader, etc.
Maybe in your country, but that's not how it worked in the one I lived in. As long as you yourself were not a threat to the top level staff (president, etc), the judiciary was relatively effective and didn't care about local oligarchs. And we just didn't have any overlords.
The US did end one foreign war quite recently. It was pretty messy, since it was definitely not a victory, and cratered the president's approval ratings. It turns out there is almost no political constituency for visibly losing a war.
Additionally, the US' kinetic operations in the Middle East have shrunk substantially as the drone strikes have been substantially curtailed, again under the same president that recently extracted the US from a long-running foreign war. He got no credit for that either; it turns out nobody in the US really cares very much, and even the people who generally disapprove of US foreign military involvements don't seem excited to give credit to the current guy.
The US has always ping-ponged between loving foreign wars and hating foreign wars. Not having a reliably anti-war party is not great, but that's at least as much the fault of the voters.
Remember Code Pink that was so active protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? They are protesting the war in Ukraine, but notice how the media is not giving them hardly any attention now. These grassroots activist movements are just as much provoked into activity as they are genuine organicly driven.
It's possible US intelligence agencies were aware Russia was preparing to escalate their invasion of Ukraine in early 2021, so I assume that's what's being alluded to. Preparations and plans were most likely starting in Russia by then, that's true (even limited mobilization is a pretty big undertaking—it's hard to hide supply-dump preparation and heavy equipment movement and shifting soldier concentrations). Though IIRC the US government didn't start saying that publicly until late 2021/early 2022.
If they knew about it in late 2020, that info must not have made it to the upper levels of the military, given how much crying and foot-dragging they engaged in when Trump tried for his (IIRC) 90-day withdrawal. One wonders how ready our military actually is if they act like moving low-thousands troops and some equipment out of—not into!—a theater in which we control the airspace, within in a couple months, is a crazy thing to ask of them. It may have been a bad idea to withdraw that fast, sure, but some of their spokespeople they had on the circuits whining about how hard it was weren't saying it was a bad idea, but that it literally couldn't be done. Sure, Jan. Certainly, if The Shadowy Figures That Control Everything (riffing on the vibe of GP's post) had already decided we needed to shift to Ukraine, that was still a closely-kept secret in late 2020.
And I'm not as sure as GP that Biden's following through on the withdrawal was because of Ukraine, but I'd also not rule it out as extremely-unlikely—the timeline is such that it's possible.
Oh, this one's easy. Trump's withdrawal is as much of a clusterf*ck as Biden's, it sours American appetites for more military adventure, scuttling a Ukraine campaign.
Another fun exercise is to ponder how much - if any - influence Trump's supposed ties with Russia have on these hypotheticals. There was some other issue, recently, whose details have since slipped my mind, that made me think, "Oh, this 100% makes sense if you assume that Trump is being told to do Thing by a party who is trying to weaken America's position ahead of a resumption/escalation of 2014's hostilities." I believe it was something that Democrats uncharacteristically reversed course on, which, again, would lend credence to the notion that this was something of a clandestine pitched battle from the start. I wouldn't rule it out. Not from a Secret Society Ruling The World standpoint, more like Leaders In A Desperate Position Pulling Out All The Stops.
LOL, literally an example I thought of after my post. How much of the population dislikes foreign adventurism? That's a semi-common position across the aisle, among actual voters! Hell, Trump ran on it and it worked for him (once, anyway)! But typically this position has almost zero representation in our legislature, because our electoral system is really, really bad.
The 2nd will also happily get you killed during a no-knock raid (that, for bonus points, was for the wrong house), or a traffic stop, or a cop hallucinating that he saw you reaching for a nonexistent gun on your waistband.
I've, further, got some strong suspicions that a look at history and whatever limited and noisy data are available, is more likely to support the notion that our kind of gun laws are at least as much a risk to the maintenance of liberal democracy, as a protector of it. Yet, that's a common justification for why we mustn't question the 2nd. AFAIK they've contributed at least as often to imposing oppression as to resisting oppression, on the local scale in the US. Then there's revolutions in other countries, where they seem at least as often to aid overthrowing a democracy as to play a pivotal role in defending it (though, from what I can tell, they hardly matter in either case—foreign aid and gaining the support of elements of the military are usually far, far more effective in actually forcing an outcome).
That's in addition to the hard-to-quantify harm to freedom from having to worry about terrified, trigger-happy cops.
Got half a mind to research it and write a book about whatever I find....
People do, and they fail. Often, bad policies and laws stick around even when most people don't like them. I will live my whole life seeing few or none of those issues solved, no matter what I personally do—that's just a fact. I could, today, devote the rest of my life to this, and if I moved the needle at all on even one of them it'd be a miracle.
We have a uniquely-bad electoral system, which is why so much of this day-to-day stuff ends up so insanely dysfunctional compared to most other developed democracies, and we've had mass-media special interest propaganda running rampant in a way it doesn't elsewhere, since the 80s (loss of the fairness doctrine—which, admitted ickiness aside, did seem to keep things on the rails a bit—and deregulation of media outlet ownership leading to unprecedented, extreme levels of consolidation; hard to tell which of those is most responsible, since they both happened around the same time) and that propaganda's able to be unusually effective in part because of our bad electoral system.
The result is that as long as factions in favor of these shitty things can stay under one of the two big tents, they get the tacit support of all the rest of the factions under those tents, even if most of them don't like that first group of factions. "Of course civil forfeiture's bullshit, obviously it is... but I can't vote for a pro-choicer/communist/whatever!" et c. (and, yes, the effect is on "both sides"—it's why we hear a ton of noise from "no abortion ever!" and "zero restrictions until the baby takes its first breath!" while the majority of voters, who just want more-or-less what Roe guaranteed, get little attention)
So, our freedom to vote is even, arguably, quite a bit less-free than for a fair proportion of our peers, since our ability, in practice, to express our actual desires through the electoral process is much more curtailed than in most of them—though, obviously, that part doesn't apply to authoritarians states.
If you go beyond the level of shouting on a street corner and start building real power, you will be dragged through the mud by the combined force of corporate media smears and social media discourse swarm influence operations. If you go further you will be murdered by the state. Ask Fred Hampton and others.
Could you though? I mean in theory it’s possible but the barriers are basically insurmountable for creating a viable 3rd party. It’s like trying to remove Putin by voting him out.
Highly unlikely in one election cycle. The parties control both houses, the presidency, the states and the locals almost completely.
Step one is stop voting for incumbents and seriously consider voting out incumbents unless they are really, really good; exceptional. The longer someone stays in power, the more power they get, the more deals they make, the less accountable they feel. It's good to get fresh blood and a fresh outlook every term too. Really the bottom line is we expect change, but we keep voting the same people in and those people serve for decades. It's almost an insanity.
Once the existing political parties are weakened by turnover, you can start placing third party people in there. Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.
> Now is a good time too, the mainstream media's credibility is on it's heels and has less influence over elections than traditionally.
Most of the ground the mainstream media has lost is to absolutely whacko q-anon and alt-right podcasters and video bloggers and alt-news, which is not a great environment for third-party people, unless the third-party that you're trying to start is a christo-fascist movement.
I would hope there's a large subsection of the population that has lost trust in the traditional news sources and the credibility of their opinions on candidates, but also doesn't buy into the wacky fringe stuff.
The UK has the same bullshit FPTP system as the USA, but they have more successful 3rd parties.
The SNP dominates in Scotland. LibDems were even able to participate in a govt coalition. And both Conservatives and Labour are completely irrelevant in Northern Ireland - which has completely different parties than the rest of the UK.
So what prevents parties similar to the SNP and LibDems to get elected in the USA?
We have elections... but once in a while a shadowy organization within the government assassinates the President if he becomes too much of a threat to the establishment, allegedly.
That law is prefaced with "No person shall solicit votes in any manner"... clearly making it more about stopping political influence at the polls by giving things away. Also it only applies within 150 feet of the building anyway.
"But at least we have the 2nd, to protect our freedom. Seems to be working great. (I actually also think folks here overestimate how hard it is to get guns in some countries with effective gun control—it doesn't have to mean "no guns", and often doesn't)"
We have elections... but everyone is so terrified of the LOLWTF numbers of guns in society that we never leave the house
You don't like some park regulation vote for someone who will change it. If no one running is willing to do that then you can run for office. If no one votes for you that sucks.
Democracy isn't about getting what you want. This reminds me of people who say "not my president " or "I didn't vote for that"
The other part of authoritarianism that’s less popular to talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well. In many parts of the “free” US, you can’t leave a visible bag in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because you’ll return to a smashed window. In places where that kind of petty crime is dealt with harshly, it’s almost non-existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the trains run on time.
So authoritarianism often gets a lot of the small stuff right at the cost of the big stuff while freedom often means sacrificing a lot of those small things to get the big stuff right. Having a society where you’ve got the best of both worlds is a really hard balance to strike.
And while it’s really easy to say that the big stuff is more important, the subjective feeling of freedom can be more affected by the small stuff because it’s much more a part of daily life. I don’t need to criticize my government on a daily basis, I only need to do that at critical moments. But I have to park my car multiple times a day, and needing to keep it safe becomes a front-of-mind concern that makes me feel less free.
> The other part of authoritarianism that’s less popular to talk about is that, in many ways, it works very well. In many parts of the “free” US, you can’t leave a visible bag in your vehicle for more than a few minutes because you’ll return to a smashed window. In places where that kind of petty crime is dealt with harshly, it’s almost non-existent. As trite as it sounds, Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Actually that semi quote is typically used in relation to the Spanish civil war and it's an old lady saying "the anarchists were certainly a weird bunch, but they did make the trains run on time).
Also the correlation between harsh punishment and lower crime rates is dubious at best. The US has harsher penalties than most other Western democracies, but higher crime rates. This applies in particular to murder, where the rates are higher despite the death penalty. To add some anecdotal evidence, the only place I was ever pickpocketed was in Shanghai (where punishment is extremely harsh) and I have visited places like Nigeria which has a much less functioning law enforcement system.
You can also get the same outcome (i.e. not smashed windows) without an authorization government. I'm not even sure these are meaningfully related, there are many countries which are both less authoritarian (in certain ways at least) than the US and also have less crime.
America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not many other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult the government/leaders/policy without repercussion. USA has arguably the greatest freedom of speech protections on earth which is one liberty that is not worth trading for the freedom to drink wine more easily when picnicking in certain places - hence why people are not flocking to authoritarian states that "feel freer" than USA.
> America has a lot of quirks and problems, but in not many other countries can you flagrantly criticize/insult the government/leaders without repercussion.
This is possible in most of the developed world. You don't have to have the peculiarities of the American concept of "freedom" to have this one. Someone in Norway gets to enjoy both healthcare and being able to make mean comments about the Prime Minister.
Not so. UK, Germany, and indeed most of the EU have significant speech restrictions accompanied by censorship or jail time if you violate them.
I'm not super familiar with Norway's speech protections, but it has a smaller population than the US state of Maryland, so it seems to be the exception more than the rule or at least not an easily scalable solution to America's problems. Saying "[Insert Scandinavian country proves it's possible]" is like saying "Look at how well Hacker News is moderated! Facebook and Twitter should take notes on how to do it right and fix the moderation issues with their services."
They have very specific speech restrictions around things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing the government". I'll happily give up freedom to publicly be a neo-Nazi if it gives me freedom from "out of network" healthcare bills.
Neither society is 100% free; that's the point, really. The trade-offs like this that the American system has selected seem insane.
Googling Heinrich Bücker doesn't turn up much other than "World Socialist Web Site", and it appears Germany permits opposition to war just fine; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa0PevmD6EI
America is like a union of 50 countries, yet the things you chose to criticize were for the most part not federal level restrictions, but rather cherry-picked quirks of individual states.
> They have very specific speech restrictions around things like Holocaust denial, not "flagrantly criticizing the government".
Germany, maybe. In UK a scottish man was arrested for tweeting "The only good brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuurrn." about the late Tom Moore. Apparently being arrested for offensive tweets is not uncommon in the UK. Lots of arrested around the time of the queen's death for making fun of the monarchy/dead queen.
> Novak v. City of Parma, No. 21-3290, is a 2022 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granting qualified immunity to the city of Parma, Ohio, and its officials for prosecuting Anthony Novak over a Facebook page parodying the Parma Police Department's page. As of December 2022, the case is pending certiorari before the Supreme Court of the United States.
> cherry-picked quirks of individual states
Civil forfeiture? Healthcare? Incarceration? Paid leave? These are each widespread national problems in the US.
Googling ‘arrested for tweeting uk’ brings up some daily mail stories which are quoted in brietbart and other similar websites. Can you find a link to a reliable source? E.g Telegraph, Guardian, Times, Financial Times.
Also in the UK being arrested doesn’t equate to being punished, legally the police have to arrest you before you can be questioned.
It was dozens of Canadians, it was a transaction freeze by certain banks for a few days, and it was because there was a suspicion of contributing to terrorist organizations. It was not an action by the government and the freeze was lifted quite quickly once the facts were established.
No. Here's a protip which applies to every country across the globe: if you're donating money to people doing things your government decided is illegal with the express purpose of enabling continued illegal acts, you're gonna have a bad time.
99.8% of Canadians would like to have a word with you to explain why funding organizations with the public and express raison d'etre of overthrowing the government might get you a finger waggling.
No, not that statement on its own, and no one's seen jail time in Norway for hate speech alone. The post specifically targeted an individual for harassment.
And, again, these tend to be matter of perspective; balancing the right of free speech against the right to be free of discrimination. Each country is picking in these scenarios where rights conflict; I tend to prefer Norway's selections.
> hence why people are not flocking to authoritarian states that "feel freer" than USA
People are flocking to all kinds of places you are apparently not aware of:
> Saudi Arabia is among the top five immigrant destination countries around the world, currently hosting 5.3 million international migrants in its borders
That's just one example even though this one is probably not the "feel freer" type. There are others.
Go look at the extent of anti-BDS legislation and how appeals courts have upheld it in spite of 40 year old precedents to the contrary then talk about “free speech”.
You are so right. In America you can lead protests and bring to light uncomfortable truths about the government and they can't do anything about it. They do tend to find you dead in your car a few months later... but I'm sure that's just a coincidence though. The important thing is that there are laws that are there to protect you, unlike other countries which aren't as free as the USA.
Fully agreed here - I grew up in ex-Yugoslavia, which while it wasn't part of the Eastern bloc, it wasn't too dissimilar. It was perfectly acceptable and expected for kids to be out and about without direct parent supervision. Neighbours knew kids from the surrounding and would take care of them as needed. At 11-12, I walked to the store by myself or with similar aged friends many times to buy beer for my dad. The store owner happily sold it to me as he knew my dad and knew if I did buy it for myself, it would take no more than a day or two to find out. Police would have never questioned any part of this behaviour, it was fully normalized. I'd say it definitely resulted in children being more independent.
You and the parent are touching on the key difference. The neighborhood was a community who knew each other and looked out for each other. In the US this dichotomy is exceptionally rare, so a young child walking alone is truly among strangers. I am not saying that kids shouldn't have freedom to roam but it's different.
America lacks community in many places. I don't know if it's uniquely American, but it's very common. Neighbors don't know neighbors, the shop owner doesn't know who kid's parents are.
This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.
> This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.
I guess this is polar opposite: the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside. Since kids are not allowed outside, you build "suburban sprawls": rows of houses with literally nowhere for those kids to go even if they wanted. And then you transport them directly to school and sports with a personal car. So the kids do not have interaction with other kids, because they are neither allowed to nor there is a field to play in. Naturally the other parents don't know the kids further than immediate neighbors.
The twist is that now the infrastructure is suddenly lone-kid-hostile.
> the situation is like this because kids are not allowed outside.
Imagine if the street-scene was crowded with kids. They would witness vandalism and bad behaviour, and wrongdoers would be much more cautious. I wish kids would play outside on the estate where I live.
>This is in my opinion is the primary reason why kids aren't allowed out alone.
All other developed nations have big, urban areas where people don't know all their neighbors, yet they don't have this weird problem America has. I live in Tokyo, the most populated metro area on the planet, and I see little kids riding around on their bikes, by themselves, at night. Little kids riding the subways to places far from home, by themselves, is perfectly normal. I've also seen kids walking by themselves in Europe.
This is uniquely an American problem. IMO, Americans are simply paranoid.
How do we find places that still value and foster this kind of community?
And how do we contribute to it ourselves? Lately I've been wanting to be intentional about getting involved, getting to know people, etc. I came across this blog post on the topic from HN a few months ago: https://www.seanblanda.com/its-time-for-localism-in-america/
It's just my own theory but perhaps there is some relationship between loss community and a few things:
* A two parent working household meant that there were less stay-at-home moms around to network in the community and build familiarity with other moms and neighboring families.
* The use of cars meant that there was less opportunity for interaction while walking in the neighborhood.
* Local church where people built a community through faith.
I grew up in the former Eastern bloc (Poland) in a small town and we had this sort of free-range parenting there. When I was around 9 or 10 I would spend my whole days playing outside with the other kids from the neighborhood, especially in the summer. Sort of like the "Bullerbyn children" in Astrid Lindgren's book. Sometimes one of us was sent on an errand (like to a local shop) and others went along to keep company. There were 5 of us hanging out regularly and most of us lived in two working parent households except one who had a SAH mother and another who was raised by a working single mother. So I don't think the lack of SAH moms is a factor here. Also, my parents are not religious and there definitely was no faith-based community. My parents actually didn't know that well the parents of other kids, we kids just met each other somehow in the area or were introduced by other kids that we knew. I think it was rather a combination of living in a safe neighborhood - suburb with low traffic (even now Poland has less cars per capita than US https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...) and people being just less paranoid back then. Also, the societal expectations towards children have shifted in the recent years, now people often try to micromanage their children's time and provide them with too many after-school activities so kids don't have time to just hang around.
Regardless of Eastern bloc vs West, or anywhere else, I think the biggest issue might simply be era.
Parents in the States were much more permissive in the 80s, and to a certain extent the 90s. That started to change in the 2000s, with far greater "helicopter parenting."
So are these descriptions of idyllic life in ex-Yugoslavia five years ago, or twenty?
I grew up in central Europe in the 80s and was given plenty of freedom, but I don't know whether kids there have the same amount as before, or if it has been changed like in the US.
There are plenty of countries where kids can still live in freedom. I can let my 8 year old son play outside with his 7 year old friend, and trust they'll be alright. I see lots of kids around their age go to their judo lessons on their own. This should be completely normal.
For police to come and arrest parents for trusting their children with some basic freedom is unbelievably oppressive. It's bizarre to hear this coming from a country that once claimed to be the "land of the free". And this is hardly the first story like this.
My experience ends in mid-90s, but from what I understand it is still far more permissive than US/Canada. In Finland for example, kids go to school alone starting in grade 1 (walk or public transport). That is definitely not something you will see often in Canada. I do absolutely agree though - anecdotally speaking of course, parents today are far less permissive than "back in the day".
I have no issue with my kids (8 and 9) playing outside alone provided they don't venture out onto the thoroughfare street. My concern is with irresponsible and inattentive drivers, including residential construction traffic.
I walked to school for Kindergarten and 1st grade. Roughly a mile each way. This was in the early 70s, and though I see some kids walk to the nearby elementary school, the majority are dropped off by their parents in their huge SUVs...
My 7yo daughter goes to school alone, by subway. Not every day, and it's only two stations, but still. Nobody bats an eye. This is in Berlin, though not in a dangerous area.
I feel like the fear around "stranger danger" played a huge role in normalizing the idea that children shouldn't be unsupervised and that the police needed to enforce truancy laws with more urgency.
Nobody is making the literal comparison. Eastern bloc was a totally different form of repression, the top poster in the thread was just making a clumsy comparison between different forms of oppressive state action. Connecticut has plenty of citizens with license plates, stickers, and flags on vehicles that mock or call for violence against the current US president. They do so without any fear of imprisonment. Try that with a Solidarity sticker in Poland in the 80s. I have no doubt they had a healthier view towards independence in childhood in Poland in the 1980s, though.
As smart people, let's get a grip and realize that outlier incidents happen all the time, and just question the why and when they get coverage.
This is maybe more about time then about the place. Before, growing up in Slovakia, I walked streets of a city as kid alone. Now when I mentioned it to some parents (even in village) they think that I was so brave (even if they did the same).
Only children that you can see in parks or on the streets of Bratislava alone are refugees from Ukraine.
They probably did watch the news, but it would be very different news on the state-run Jugoslavenska Radiotelevizija.
(If this incident had happened in Yugoslavia, or something similar with unjust police harassment, would anyone have heard about it on the news? Of course not.)
Probably not as different as one would hope compared to North American news of unjust harassment/abuse by police, religious/sport organization some 10-20+ years ago. I didn't see major Canadian news sources overflowing with content about abuse suffered in residential schools until fairly recent for example. That's not to paint any sort of a rosy Jugo picture, far from it.
> Serious question: what did the Eastern block used to do sex offenders?
Unless the EB was radically different from the rest of 1970s Earth, nothing.
In the US, pre-1980s kids knew not to take any kind of abuse to the police. At best they'd be gaslit or outed to their abuser (who was commonly family). For most of LEO history cops (who reflected society in general) were not there to protect kids. Perps certainly knew this.
Source: We kids talked to each other and figured out reality pretty fast.
Ah yes - familiar and agree with this as well. It does however depend significantly on whether the perp was known to you or not. You'd be far more likely to report a stranger abusing you randomly on the street than say your family member, teacher, coach, etc. (see Hockey Canada for a sad example of this continuing to date).
You’re leaving out the part where the police got COS involved who then harassed the family for months. As others have mentioned, they’d have no ability to sue for the actions of the officers unless there was existing case law about almost the exact situation. Qualified immunity protects officers who do stupid shit like this.
I think the main issue in this story is that most Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving their kids outside by themselves, even though it’s really safe outside. It’s a real issue.
It's silly to pretend that there are no people who might want to do harm to children, but as a father, I'm not really worried about them. I am, however, worried about the police hassling my kids and my family for the reasons presented in the article.
My kids are very very little now, but it's something my partner and I discuss how to handle in the future. We live in a typical suburb now, but we're planning a move to the city for several reasons. Counterintuitively, we think this will provide our children more freedom to grow. Our impression is that police authority goes unchecked in the suburbs, while the city resists police overreach (sometimes).
Conversely, some neighbors just moved in from Seattle (I'm in an east coast suburb). They are ecstatic they can just let their kids play outside now. Something they said they couldn't do when living back in the city.
> I think the main issue in this story is that most Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving their kids outside by themselves
Father of 5 here and you are fully correct. Our kids are not meaningfully safer with constant supervision - and by mandating it, we're knee-capping their ability to develop problem solving skills.
Police officers in the United States are universally indemnified by their employers. There’s no constitutional or case law which requires this it’s just the rule everywhere.
Indemnification means that their employer (i.e. municipalities) must pay for their legal defense in a civil suit and any judgment that arises under it.
1983 cases are technically against individuals but not at all in a practical sense.
For some reason activists have zero interest in tackling this issue even though it could be done on a divide and conquer basis and even though it would provide much more deterrence than eliminating QI. I almost suspect the influence of the plaintiffs’ bar is at play.
I'm still confused on what your saying. If a public official wins a § 1983 suit under a qualified immunity defense, there are no monetary damages to be indemnified against. Their employers only have to indemnify them if it is found they did not have qualified immunity and then had a judgement against them.
Are you saying that, for practical purposes, qualified immunity doesn't matter to the individual as they will almost always be indemnified anyway? I suppose this is true in a pragmatic way, but not in theory. As you say, there's no law that says the government agency has to indemnify. While I'd be surprised to find a case where the official ended up paying anything out of their own pocket, there are plenty of cases where the official has lost their job over a judgement against them and none that I could find where they won the case due to being covered under qualified immunity but still lost their job over it.
Practically speaking there is no effective recourse. For things to change, need USSC to remove the qualified immunity doctrine which USSC basically created on their own in 1970s. State law could put in a few fixes, but generally few people are really interested.
A couple years ago BLM had energy yet was distracted and diverted from the enabling problem - USSC qualified immunity.
They key difference here is whether you care more about bad officers facing consequences or the victims getting compensation.
Eliminating qualified immunity only helps with the second part and does zero with respect to the first, but advocates of reform never make that clear.
Even with qualified immunity sometimes victims win judgments. On the other hand indemnification is 100% universal and effective at protecting cops. No cop ever pays anything out of his own pocket, period.
I have a feeling that if municipalities start having to pay out lots of settlements for civil rights abuses by police, they'll start reconsidering the limits of indemnification.
Agreed. I am from ex Yugoslavia and for many... interesting things that growing up there entailed, my childhood was free. I walked to school starting grade 1! In a city of half a million I and all my classmates safely crossed intersections and walled to school every day.
Now I'm in Ontario and statuary limit for leaving child alone is... sixteen years :O
We can see school from out house but do not dare let our (independent safe and bright) child walk, not due to fear of crime, but the real fear of some overzealous bored neighbour calling it in.
I think the legal penalties for being negligent towards children stem from rich people making up laws as a response to narratives about rare occurences that take places in environments lawmakers have 0 experience with (low-income neighbourhoods). They feel as though less children would be harmed if they always had an adult present with them, which is feels like a solid assertion if you have the means to provide adult supervision at all times, ignoring the alternative costs of letting children experience independence and completely misunderstanding the every day reality of low-income parents.
> as a response to narratives about rare occurences
I think this is the root of it. Before the advent of mass media, you would hear about crimes if those crimes happened to people you personally know, but probably not otherwise. Rare crimes were rarely heard about and therefore people had an intuitive understanding that those crimes were rare. Mass media changed all of this. The most rare sort of crime is the most newsworthy because novelty sells newspapers. So the media has people fixated, worrying, about very rare sorts of crimes and this has made the general population much more irrational about rare crimes than it ever was before. Journalists may sometimes say that their job is to inform the public, but very often they induce a perception of reality that is less accurate than what people would have formed on their own with no journalist around to make a huge deal out of freak rare occurrences.
>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
I am so sorry to hear you have to act as if your kids are babies because of rules that don't recognize human competence! -- Lenore (I wrote Free-Range Kids)
> That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.
I gently suggest that you might be missing the forest for the trees here. OP is referring to the well documented (Eastern block level authoritarianism) practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).
>practices of bringing the machinery of the state down on the head of the average citizen for minor infractions (whether or not they are really infractions) with consequences (arrests, professional and social consequences, disappearance, torture, gulags) out of all proportion to the crime (whether or not an actual crime rooted in principles of natural justice is involved).
That happens here, it's just not coordinated before the fact. If you piss a policeman off by taking too long to pull over, they will beat you and get away with it. There are many examples of this on YouTube, here is a relatively minor one. This poor woman will be forever traumatized by this event. Those police won't get fired and it's pretty obvious they have some serious anger issues.
I feel policing and the overall justice system is the single largest threat to our country right now and if it isn't rectified will lead to massive civil unrest. This channel covers a lot of it.
Tangent here. I grew up in Greece. Policing, but the culture of government in general is don't sweat the little things, but you better get the important stuff right.
I went to a hospital and the building looked in rough shape not really clean. The examination room had a leak in the corner. But you bet the doc knew what she was doing, was thorough and sterilized everything. It's not pretty, but gets the job done.
In the 2000s we used to pirate like there was no tomorrow. But cp is taken seriously.
>That is uncalled for, I know a ton of people that grew up in Warsaw Pact countries and they could in fact walk to Babushka's Dumpling Shop and back without getting their parents arrested.
Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
You'd know what happened if you'd read the article.
The police did drop charges. But then a social worker got involved and they had years of grief afterwards because of it. Which couldn't have been reported on back when the event happened, and makes it a lot more than just "stupid cops got immediately corrected".
Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere. Which is another can of worms.
> Honestly I would have liked to see the police sued for what they did, but the whole doctrine of "qualified immunity" means that that would go nowhere.
QI doesn't stop you from suing “the police” (as in, the public agency responsible), it stops (absent clear precedent eatablishing the right on which you are suing) individual public officers.
Yes. But as soon as the charges got to the department, they dropped it. The police department did nothing egregiously wrong.
It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here. And if they were, then it would do a whole lot more to dissuade other police officers than any official department policies.
And that is exactly what qualified immunity keeps from happening.
> But as soon as the charges got to the department, they dropped it.
So?
> The police department did nothing egregiously wrong.
Insofar as the officers, as agents of the department, were trained and supervised in such a way that they did something egregiously wrong in the conduct of their duties, the police department did, in fact, due something equally wrong.
> It is the individual police officers that I would like to see be liable here.
Then you should favor suing the responsible department because, given QI, you need a clearly established right for their to be personal liability, and the only way to get there is to sue someone to clearly establish the right. Which can't be the individuals, because QI.
(Even without QI, you should favor suing the deoartment, because individual officers can be disposable and replaced with people selected and trained for the same tendencies, but department leadership and policies that keeping turning into a liability hole for the local government are more likely to trigger more significant changes.)
I should not favor suing the department when I can find no legal theory under which they should be liable. And in this case it was an individual officer mistake that directly did no harm, and was corrected as soon as it came to the department's attention. I'm not going to find anything in police training or general behavior that fits with this mistake being a general pattern that is endemic to the department. I see no damages or legal relief that makes sense here.
Arguing about what good might come from the department losing said lawsuit is like debating how convenient it might be if pigs could fly. The whole conversation is based on something that isn't going to happen, and therefore isn't a real possibility. And any attempt to go from discussion to reality by actually filing said lawsuit is a waste of effort.
Throughout most of the USSR at the time, there was actually comparatively very little violent crime, including child kidnapping. Kids roamed freely.
It is just as well, because USSR preceded USA and Europe by a few decades to have BOTH parents work and thus the actual neglect of the kids began. Under socialism this was “emancipation of women” and proceeded also in Muslim countries like Uzbekistan, where women now worked all day in the same professions as men. Socialists were far ahead by decades in this regard.
But of course, this leads to a generation of kids who grow up without any parents most of the time, and raised by the state and the street — it is also what we have in the USA now too. The only difference is that most people work for large corporations instead of socialist cooperatives or government jobs:
Except babushka didn't have a dumpling shop because private enterprise was outlawed. You probably mean the Pastry Workers' Cooperative, an organization that didn't actually make dumplings because flour and vegetable oil was ratoinalized. The state was exporting those ingredients to the West at a loss in order to obtain dollars and pay back the IMF loans. Instead, the PWC shop had lots of vinegar and pickled cucumbers for sale. Which was too bad, because nobody wanted to buy those things.
Funnily enough, I'm from the Eastern bloc (Poland) and apparently my grandma used to run a grocery store for some time in the 1980's. It could have been technically government owned, I never inquired. Whatever was the legal status, it was called "Grandma's store" in my family.
I know several other people already commented, but still I want to add my own view because this pains me.
I grew up in the 1970s/80s in an area of two 35 thousand people towns (plus lots and lots of smaller towns and villages - rural but it's still all densely populated).
We had all the freedoms to go anywhere except doing school hours - as long as we didn't drive (pretty far) to the German-German border area. Which I would not even have been able to point out the direction. I was in the forests and out alone ALL THE TIME, and so was everybody else. I also was a "key child", this too was very common, I had a house key and was left alone in our house all afternoon, and again, that was common.
Independence, education, sports - the East did not want to raise feeble people. Daily life was NOT some dystopian thing. Youth life was full of biking around in the afternoons, visiting friends all over the place or into the fields and woods, weekend parties, and we were mostly left alone, by parents too.
When I visited the US for two months, driving around in an old car I had bought (~20 - rental car was too expensive for that long, surcharge for being young too) - and sleeping in it most of the time. My impression afterwards was that the US was quite the police state. Sleeping in the care alone, never mind driving in an old car near the Mexican border once, got me lots of friendly meetings with ne police friends... never had any problems and it was all friendly, with my German passport and my story of driving from New York to Alaska to San Diego to Key West to Washington D.C. and lots of loops for scenery and NPs on the way, but I don't think I had a SINGLE encounter with East German police in all my life. Okay once, visiting the East Berlin airport, when I was with a friend who looked "non-standard", they only checked his ID and nothing from me.
And when I saw "Employee of the Month" parking at the very first McDonals I drove by in my new (old) car I could not stop laughing. THIS was sooooo East German! And we even had jokes about it, assuming such a thing would never exist in the West! And here I was in the capitalist mother country and saw a key component of "socialist" worker life.
I don't think OP referred to authoritarianism about children, but authoritarianism in general.
If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned. And they probably would have been suspects for the rest of their life.
I'm pretty sure you can find happy kids in North Korea too, it doesn't mean they're not living in an authoritarian society.
OP wrote in response to a very specific incident, and he wrote exactly about that specific incident before he wrote
> This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism. Police are out of control.
So I would say my assumption that he was talking about exactly that incident are quite justified, and this was specifically about children walking around on their own.
I have no idea how in that very specific text and context of OPs comment some general statement about Eastern Bloc authoritarianism can be deduced, or if it can, how it would make any sense to suddenly bring that up in that very specific context, which OPs comment maintains. As far as I can tell it's always within this frame of the story.
I see no reason why my response would not fit perfectly. The Eastern Bloc did not have that problem, it makes no sense to try to reframe it. How does it matter that they (we) had lots of other problems? ones not the subject of the current discussion?
Who is arguing other than you? What is there to side-track? People are providing their anecdotes about the Eastern bloc and growing up in it, and how it differs from the western stereotype.
A curious mind would encourage learning more about something you likely have had no real world experience with.
> If you had tried to get over the wall you'd been shot and your family questioned.
Although I agree with aspects o your general point, this is a bad take.
Pretty sure this is also true of the US-Mexico border wall. It's just much longer so it's easier to get away with, but if you tried to cross illegally in front of a law enforcement official and ignored their orders to stop, odds are very good you'd be shot. And your family would definitely be questions during the ensuing investigation.
Maybe the Mexican border guards would shoot you for trying to illegally enter their country. But East German border guards were shooting East Germans who were welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.
I think there's a good chance that you'd be shot at by US law enforcement if you tried to make an end-run through a border checkpoint, regardless of which direction you're going. In fact, they might even be more aggressive in the US -> Mexico direction (because follow-and-detain is less of an option and the presumption that anyone heading that direction illegally is either smuggling or evading arrest).
> But East German border guards were shooting East Germans who were welcomed by West German guards. Pretending that this is a typical state of border affairs is gross revisionism.
As a counter to your story I grew up in the US, in a largish city, my friends and I also had basically total freedom to wander around, we mostly spent time in the nearby parks/playgrounds (of which there were 3), but we had quiet a bit of autonomy.
I’m sure there were children in Moscow, Kyiv or Cracow who had very different experiences from you. Whose parents did something that caught the KGB’s attention and then they were in for a world of pain.
I think it’s very accurate to say that for most people living in a relatively rural area anywhere in the world, they’ll be pretty safe from this sorta attention. The big difference is the degree to which your life is ruined. In China (or USSR) any sort of individual disagreement with the police would virtually guarantee a trip to an undisclosed location, bribes and probably torture. Here in the US you still have to deal with people and their egos but many of the laws will protect you from the worst of other peoples’ power trips.
How is your grabbing at straws, bringing in something completely different - politically persecuted - and making assumptions ("I'm sure") and looking for the worst outliers instead of what is normal inside the distribution curve a "counter"?
Sometimes I'm just disgusted by the discussion. Some people, instead of curiosity and wanting to learn, have some cognitive dissonance issue whenever anyone says anything non-binary about the East. The responses are always exactly the same and perfectly predictable too.
Imagine somebody said something about their nice life in the US of A and then you would always and predictably get a slew of responses along the lines of "but police shootings", "not true democracy because only two parties both heavily dependent on big money", "health care", "prisons", "US wars after WWII", "guns", etc. etc. Point being, anything but pointing out to the negatives is accepted by those people, "Thou must not have any other truths!" kind of.
>Just to clarify, the analogy I'm drawing is to how beyond reproach authority is to the average citizen, not making any point about whether or not Warsaw Pact children could travel freely.
You could even extend this and say that the level of authoritarianism on display is what I was told Eastern bloc countries were like (and why they were bad).
This analogy is a huge hyperbole and the sole number of people addressing that suggests that many people might consider it to be misinformation that should be corrected before it spreads.
Even if you meant authoritarian approach towards citizen in general (not regarding parenting), this is also incorrect. People who stayed out of politics weren't really persecuted here in Poland. Activists, independent journalists and priests were persecuted by the police but ordinary people just went on with their lives (although it is true that the regime used to be very oppresive in the 1940s-50s before Stalin died in 1956).
Most of our cops a no longer people who want to protect their communities. They're losers who like the feeling of power. The ability to impose their will on others is a rush.
If the cops wanted to protect their communities, they would have spent 15 minutes keeping an eye on the kids, see they're buying donuts, and go about their day.
Instead they made their community less safe by creating even more doubt and distrust in police, in their community, and psychologically injuring the parents and children.
My freshman year roommate at university (who was a random assignment) ended up dropping out of his science major our first year and decided he wanted to pursue being a cop. When I asked him why he said "I just want to be able to fuck with people", sort of jokingly, but also you could tell he meant it.
He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant. If you put someone like that in an environment with other people that are also there for the power trips, these sorts of situations are the outcome you get.
>Most people I meet are more friendly than even neutral.
It's generally true when there is no competition or pressure of some sort, when there is competition it's start to bring out the latent evil in most people. That is how authoritarian groups evolve.
I'm no fan of cops but I blame the system as much or more. Police are designed to arrest evict and cite, and little more. Make the rewards revolve around protection rather than punishment and the people currently police would go back to a more suiting pursuit for their personality which is likely violent crime.
The cops are the system. The people deciding in the moment what to do are cops, the people deciding who is going to be in those positions are cops, the people deciding the consequences for the decisions are cops, the people investigating abuses are cops. The people in oversight positions for the entire process are cops. The civilian government might be able to dismiss the top ranking leadership, the DA's office can choose to prosecute especially egregious behavior, but they have very little if any direct influence on the incentive structures for rank and file cops. Institutions like police unions typically have more control of the civilian government than the civilian government has on the police. This is a system that the cops both individually and collectively choose to participate in, and those who would seek to see it changed from the inside are forced out. Of course you can't place the blame on any one individual, and probably every person involved would like to see some change or another, but there is no shadowy cabal who designed the police to be what they are, they have done it themselves.
They are different even today in first world countries. Where I live, becoming a police officer is a three year education (equivalent to a bachelor's degree) and it's not easy to get accepted to the programme. Training on what the law actually says, de-escalation, handling mentally ill people etc. is an important part of this.
As a consequence, most cops are good human beings who care about their community.
This is also my personal experience, including a good friend of mine who opted for policing for these reasons after completing a degree in philosophy. He has been a beloved small town cop for many years.
We're they? Perhaps if you are white. Cops used to just harass minorities. Now they have decided that all non police must be punished and made to understand their place. Not saying it was better when they just harassed minorities, saying cops have always been power mad narcissists. Now they just have armored cars and better weapons
Edit: it's been pointed out to me that op was being sarcastic. My fault
Only if you ignore the size of the US police force, and more recently COVID. By far the #1 risk is the amount of driving police do, but policing in the US is nowhere close to as dangerous as being a truck driver.
I can see both sides. Anyone with a basic understanding of History should know that police abuses of power are nothing new. Bad cops have always existed and are well documented. Just think of some cops beating up hippies and beats in the proposed golden age of neighborhood policing.
On the flip side, there's been a definite trend in the militarization of the police forces and other public facing groups. The first big wave of this I personally saw came from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans joining the public service. Is not unreasonable to think that individuals with a background occupying a country with a hostile population transferred norms from that into their new job.
> No police officer in the country should feel comfortable making those threats. They are out of control
This is what gets me. Even if this town is as dangerous as these police claim that it is, I can think of a hundred other responses that are orders of magnitude more useful than the route they chose, if their priority is indeed the safety of the children.
Follow the kids for a bit to make sure they're ok. "Hey kids, your parents know you're going to the store? ok!" "Hey parents, you gave your kids permission to walk to the store alone? ok!" "Hey just checking in, you know that there's this sex offender around the corner right? ok!" You can surveil the sex offenders. You can, you know, make your town safer (you are the police, right?).
I doubt this town is that unsafe, however. Ironically the polarization, paranoia, untrusting nature, and general hysteria in the US are a vicious cycle that leads to actual danger and more polarization, paranoia, etc.
Agreed. This is one where qualified immunity needs to go. This is a rights violation all the way... against the kids civil rights and against the parents. Also, I'd love to listen to the 911 calls.
It's not justice at all, the parents now have an arrest record. Hopefully they never have to fill out an application that asks about that (e.g. pistol license).
A) The arrest should have never, ever happened. There needs to be a line where police know they are not allowed to cross. This I'm immune from everything because I'm an agent of the government needs to go now.
B) The arrest record needs to go away forever
C) Arrest records should never be used by government to deny rights or services, only conviction records.
Can't they atleast push for expunging of the records? No charges were pressed; if the state wants to dispute that, they are opening the gate for a lawsuit.
Pistol license applications explicitly state that you have to include expunged records. Also, what expunged actually means (or if it's available at all) depends on the state. If you wanted to work for the government, get certain clearances, etc it would also come up on background checks. So it's totally unfair that innocent people like this have it attached to their name.
> It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips
I thought this was going to be about various killings by cops, but it turns out to be a place name.
Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America. I suspect if you went looking for anecdotes involving black children you might find far worse outcomes. Nobody in this story spent even a whole night in jail! Nobody was injured! Nobody had to pay bail fees! No property damage by police! They didn't even shoot the dog.
>Anyway, this is the hugely attenuated white version of what confrontational policing gives America.
I mean, I'm not a huge fan of that stuff either, but I lived in Killingly for a number of years, so perhaps this one caught my attention for that reason?
I was more drawing analogy between how above reproach authority was (or at least how it was portrayed to me) than about whether or not children could freely explore.
It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.
I wholeheartedly agree that the fundamental issue is the complete lack of judicial accountability. These people are getting paid a salary while they harass you, clock out at 5, and their morning routine is to get right back at it. Meanwhile your entire life is personally disrupted due to their power trip and/or malicious mistake, and the best case you can hope for is to be able to walk away?
Whether or not these officers' actions were in line with official department policy, there should be automatic compensation to the victims for their arrest and imprisonment, emotional distress, hiring attorneys and other expenses incurred. And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.
> And if these officers' actions were not in line with written department policy, then they need to be treated as private citizens harassing people under the color of law, and be held personally criminally liable for the false imprisonment, etc.
Have to get rid of qualified immunity first, which we invented (in a total coincidence) at the same time cops really wanted to be thumping civil rights protesters without consequencews.
I agree that qualified immunity is a harmful and bogus precedent that needs to be eliminated. But my point is that if they are acting outside written department policy, then they're no longer acting as an agent of the state in the first place. Like when a cop beats their spouse, they can't claim qualified immunity as if it were part of their policing duties. The same standard should apply during daylight hours when they depart from the mandate of their employment.
> But my point is that if they are acting outside written department policy, then they're no longer acting as an agent of the state in the first place.
> In practice, the doctrine has shielded officers from liability in hundreds of civil cases, even when accused of destroying property, killing innocent people they mistook for suspects or stealing thousands of dollars.
(I would presume stealing thousands of dollars is forbidden by most department policies.)
I responded in the qualified immunity context, but qualified immunity is actually somewhat of a red herring. It certainly does need to be eliminated, but it is not the main problem. In fact the focus on it smells a bit like the common pattern of hoping that occasional extreme penalties on individuals will reform a situation that has poor diffuse incentives.
The main problem is extending blanket sovereign immunity to these actions/positions in the first place. Let's say someone is arrested, even on a good faith suspicion of a bona fide crime, and is then later acquitted or the charges are dropped. From the victim's perspective, what has actually taken place is a kidnapping and false imprisonment. But the current framework just writes off what happened to them as collateral damage, leaving the unlucky individual to bear it themselves. But really they've suffered an externality of policing which they should be reimbursed for. The damages should be rolled into the overall police budget so that it reflects the true cost of the police department.
Right now these externalities are being covered by a perverse reverse lottery of unlucky citizens, which is not right. Reform this perverse incentive and correctly attribute blame (economic blame, at least), and many resulting incentives will fall out from that.
> It's even worse when you think about just how many Dunkin' Donuts there are. It's likely the kids didn't even have to cross a major intersection.
Interesting how that works. My state has zero dunkin donuts. But I live 3 miles from downtown, and pass 5 starbucks, 4 dutch brothers, and a few other independant coffee shops :) but sadly, only one donut shop
I don't know which Dunkin they were going to, but the Dunkin I've been to the most in Killingly was near a major intersection. Depending on what side, they may not have had to cross one.
Growing up, I was allowed to freely travel within my neighborhood, but not cross the main roads. There was a Dunkin I could safely get to without crossing any big streets.
This is not necessarily a power trip. There are people who genuinely feel that way, and are doing this for the public good.
I think there has been a confusion in our society between well-being and safety. There are definitely circumstances where one is unsafe, but this is for their well-being (letting the teenager drive by themselves for an errand), and there are circumstances where one is safe, but someone’s well-being is degrading (helicopter parenting).
Neither of us were there, and I can’t speak for his motivations just from the article. He may well be power tripping, but I can also see someone saying that because they genuinely believe that kids should not roam around on the streets on their own. There are parents, cops, and state child safety folks who genuinely believe that.
While police overreach is an issue, I think that misses the deeper problems that gave rise to this. I have linked a different article in other comments here and elsewhere about the current epidemic of mental health issues teenagers and young adults, and the possible link to not being able to have some kind of childhood independence. Such young adults are not well adapted to the uncertainties of life.
You don't have children, I can tell. He was threatening to take away their children if they spoke to him. Would it be OK if he threatened to murder them where they stand if they said another word? If you had kids, you wouldn't think the two threats are so far apart. If someone was writing a movie about a totalitarian state and wanted you to hate a character, this is exactly a line they'd use. This is an authoritarian power-tripping asshole. He should absolutely, immediately, and irrevocably lose his job over this threat, just as he should if he threatened to murder them. I would even say jail time would be appropriate; you'd face jail time if you went into someone's home and threatened to kidnap their children. How can you possibly defend this?
I have a grown daughter, a two-year old, and one on the way.
There are lots of things you can’t tell just by text.
Who said anything about defending this? I happen to agree with the author of that article, including things she did not elaborate on in the article as an advocate of free range parenting.
It boggles my mind that people seem to read things that are not said.
> It boggles my mind that people seem to read things that are not said.
If one person misreads something, maybe they just misread it. If multiple people misread something, then maybe it wasn't expressed well in the first place.
I said for example, "this isn't necessarily a power trip". I said nothing more, and nothing less. And yet many people took that to mean something a lot more.
I say, "there are deeper issues at play", yet people are so attached to the idea that this is about police overreach.
Go to the end of the article to the author's link to her foundation, Let Grow, and see what other kind of articles the author has written about. Look at the front page, and the language. What is that foundation advocating for? Are they framing it in terms of police overreach? Is that the most important thing they are advocating for? Did they even talk about police overreach in the front-page text, above the fold?
You were dismissive and tried to do the whole “both sides” bullshit that’s so common nowadays.
You minimized the thing others care about because it doesn’t suit your needs. Just because you don’t give a shit about police brutality does not mean everyone thinks the same. By you trying to minimize discussion of it and paint both sides, you actively look like you are defending cops.
Once again, one person, maybe they misread. Multiple people, it’s on you to communicate your thoughts. If everyone is misinterpreting it in the same way, then it was just written that way; don’t blame others for reading the things you wrote.
I’m sorry but that’s just excusing the police at this point. He said that he would arrest and take away their kids if the wife dared to speak to him again.
Whatever his intentions behind that statement, that’s what someone on a power trip would say. Not in any way caring about the content, just the utterance of another word would have caused her arrest and the kids taken away.
Forgetting the fact that someone was already arrested as is. For this.
This is prime epitome of a power trip and it amazes me to see someone try to defend it as anything but.
If that is what you care about and get angry about, I won't gainsay it.
In my view, that is the smaller issue of the bigger issues at play. The author of the article, and what he is advocating for, is broader than that, but hey, if people are motivated to act and speak out because of this, sure, why not?
That is a link we make at Let Grow, too. Let Grow is the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids (which I wrote). We are trying to make childhood independence easy, normal and legal again, so kids can grow up with some adventures, problem-solving, street smarts and confidence. LetGrow.org
Letting an adult figure go with the kids to Dunkin Donuts for their safety misses the point. The deeper issue is that using “safety” as the only metric for enforcement is leading to a society where the next generation of adults is ill equipped to live as confident, responsible, independently-thinking adults.
These parents are rewarding their kids to go to Dunkin Donut on their own. In their judgement, it was safe enough to do so. If they wanted to be sure, they could have snuck behind them (but they would have to make sure they are not caught doing so, otherwise it would shatter the emerging confidence of the kids).
No one said safety should be the only metric. The other commenters are questioning the fact that safety was raised as a metric at all, despite the fact that the behavior of the officers runs counter to the metric they cite.
Can you elaborate on what you mean? I not certain, but I don’t think any U.S. police are legally allowed to demand well-being without a safety concern. What laws require well-being, and justify police threats?
Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case? The department admitted the stop was over-reach, even before the parents found out the officers had called child proctective services on the parents over walking outside. Is that demonstrating a reasonable concern for well-being? I surely want to have the right to let my kids walk around outside, and I believe that there is no U.S. law that limit this right, nor should there be one.
Beyond whether parents have a right to do this or not, is whether or not children can grow into resilient, confident, independently-thinking citizens. And what we have is a whole generation ill-adapted to the uncertainty of life, much less becoming the leaders, voters, and parents tomorrow when we’re no longer there.
> I don’t think people can define legal standards for “well-being” distinct from “safety
Maybe I don’t understand the distinction you made then. If you can’t distinguish them legally, then what is the difference you’re talking about? Are you saying that well-being is safety, and police can and should be able to arrest people & parents for failing to be well?
Thank you for asking. I think many of the responses to my comment ended up talking about parental rights, rather than this question you brought up, and I appreciate the opportunity to explore this.
I am most definitely not saying that well-being is safety, but that it seems the way people are talking about it now conflate those. I am not necessarily talking about police enforcement (though I would not be surprised if sometime in the near future, police are using well-being as a criteria for safety). Rather, I am talking about parenting style. That is something the author of that article is talking about in the broader sense; the author of that article also authored a book about "free range parenting", and why it is needed.
Safety is something that is easier to see, though I think is still problematic. There are statutes and precedence that describes levels of safety in different context. For example, from this site (https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-def...)
> An adult caring for a child has a legal responsibility to ensure that child is free from unreasonably dangerous situations. When an adult caregiver fails to adequately protect a child, states often punish this as a crime known as "child endangerment."
> Child endangerment occurs whenever a parent, guardian, or other adult caregiver allows a child to be placed or remain in a dangerous, unhealthy, or inappropriate situation. Some states charge this crime as a type of child abuse.
Note that generally, the legal responsibility here is for the circumstances, that is, the situation external to the child. (With the original article that started all of this, the question is, what circumstances are "unreasonable"?)
But what is well-being? Well-being is not the circumstances, but rather what someone experience.. Because it is not describing a circumstance, it's not something that is as easy to observe, measure, or intervene. People can (and probably will try) to use circumstances as a proxy for someone's well-being, and as such, start using the criteria already in use for "safety" as a (poor) proxy for "well-being". Because we are using safety and circumstances as a proxy for "well-being", that scenario where police starts interpreting things that way is ... not at all surprising to me, if it starts happening. Another scenario is that police enforces child safety, but it does nothing for the child's well-being.
More broadly, our society had been fairly poor about taking "well-being" into account. Setting aside the well-being of children, we also have the well-being of students, employees, livestock, family, community and ecology. Our society is setup to organize resources and means of production. Year after year, people are less and less able to participate in their own well-being, and even more importantly, less able to participate in the well-being of the community they belong to. Despite that, there are greater call for "well-being" popping up in news articles or comments from people.
Well-being is how well a living system is capable of ... well, living. If a living system is unable to live, it enters into a degenerate spiral, and dies. This isn't just the physical or biological, and includes emotional well-being and mental well-being. (There's a lot more to explore from here, such as the mental health epidemic of teenagers and young adults going on right now).
Furthermore, living systems are anti-fragile (up to a point). They grow stronger with a certain level of stress. To put it in a different way, trees grow strong because wind will occasionally shake it. The trees that grew in Biosphere 2, having grown without wind, are all fragile.
I'm not advocating you deliberately go out and shake the tree, or put a child in stressful situations. Life will already do that, naturally. And one of the best ways to do that, is to let a child have the opportunity to be independent, where they have to figure things out for themselves. My view on this is that, my job as a parent is not to remove and erase all risks, but rather, curate the environment of any catastrophic risks. The kind where a child cannot easily recover from. You gradually open up the environment to greater challenges as a child grows into their own ability to handle them.
That is difficult to do when child endangerment laws and the ways interpretation of "safety" has been shifting.
> Why do you think they might not have been doing this capriciously in this specific case?
Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely believe in this kind of safety of children.
I've read other articles like this before, and I happen to agree with this author and what this author advocating for. This goes beyond whether parents have the right to let kids go and walk on their own. It has a lot more to do about raising kids that can gain gain the kind of resiliency, grit, self-confidence, independent-thinking from being able to do stuff on their own. My kids will need to be able to do that when they grow into adults, because I am not always going to be there to be their safety net. One day, I will die, and it is their turn to make choices, to vote, to navigate their own lives, and to help raise the next generation.
So besides just advocating for changes in laws, there is a lot more to this kind of parenting than being protected by law to do so, including methods for parent this way when the laws in ones jurisdiction are not necessarily supporting this kind of parenting.
> Neither of us were there. There are people who genuinely believe in this kind of safety of children.
There is an article that describes what happened, which included the department officially stating the event was over-reach.
Maybe some people do think children shouldn’t be allowed to walk outside, and maybe those people are causing us to raise children ill-prepared for adulthood. I did not question whether such people exist, what I questioned is your conclusion that the existence of such people suggests the police were justified. The police should not be those people, and they do know better institutionally, even if individual officers overstep. The U.S. police force has no legal basis for threatening or arresting parents when kids are unaccompanied, there’s no law requiring parents to accompany kids, whether or not there is concern for their well being. Which is why their department admitted they made a mistake…
That, while is an important issue, is not the most important issue brought out by this article.
Life is uncertain, and adults are called to choices weigh risk and opportunities. And there is an epidemic of teenagers and young adults right now, cycling in and out of mental health facilities. There are otherwise healthy kids who are afraid of doing normal things by themselves. They go to learn to “adult” in college, but really, they never have the opportunity to make their own choices and learn from their own successes and failures. And that comes about from a society and legal framework that values “safety” to beyond a reasonable point that is healthy for people.
These laws and the way they are interpreted has shifted dramatically over the past decade or so. And it has a lot to do with how our society views this. Seeing this as only about parental rights misses the point, and in my view, short-sighted.
> There are otherwise healthy kids who are afraid of doing normal things by themselves.
Yes, I've witnessed this first-hand. My wife and I had our then-nine-year-old niece for the afternoon; we took her out to do a few things, played in the pool, ate dinner, and then took her back to her mother's house. At one point, she wanted some ice cream. Well, sure, why not. We happened to be very close to a grocery store and handed her some money and told her to go inside and get whatever flavor she wanted.
She kept saying we had to go with her, that there might be someone waiting to snatch her. It took a surprisingly long time to convince her that a small grocery store with one customer entrance/exit that we were immediately in front of represented the lowest imaginable risk for something like that. But, in the end, she went in and selected and bought her own ice cream.
By her age, both of us were riding our bikes without adult supervision (but usually with friends) to places a mile or so from the house to get - you guessed it - ice cream (or milkshakes, or whatever). I have read Ms. Skenazy's stories before, and knew how bad this was intellectually, but that was the first time I actually saw just how damaging it is to children to be raised as complete dependents on adults. If you're afraid to walk into a 1960s-size grocery to buy ice cream at age nine, how in the world are you going to be prepared for the maelstrom of your teenage years, let alone being an 18-year-old college student on their own?
Again, to clarify, I was not saying children in Eastern bloc countries were arrested for exploring. I was saying that authority was (at least viewed as by Western countries) beyond reproach.
The infuriating thing isn't that the police made mistakes or were jerks. It's that the family can do nothing to achieve justice against the state/the state has no consequences.
For sure I understand, I was not trying to say you were wrong. My point was in some ways our system is worse than what we consider dystopian authoritarian systems.
It's supposed to. This is Reason's schtick, publishing click magnets about terrible overreach by our evil Big Government Overlords, and you need to give this publication a ton of salt if you read it.
Like start out by noticing that this isn't journalism. It's written by Lenore Skenazy "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement." Quite literally this is an evangelism and fundraising piece by a charity that benefits from exactly the outrage it's trying to drive.
If the guy was arrested, where's a link to the records? Where are the statements from police? This apparently happened four years ago. Where's the contemporary coverage? Why does a Google search for "Killingly CT parent arrested 2019" return a bunch of SEO cross links to the same story by the same person?
I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm saying we need to be a little more careful with what we get upset about.
Oh please. They publish a lot of journalism and have been covering police abuse for decades including work by Radley Balko back in 2017 when no one cared. Senior editor Jacob Sullum has won awards for his journalism on drug policy. Elizabeth Nolan Brown does great investigative work around sex workers. It isn’t a click bait farm, even if YOU disagree with their politics.
At some point they went deep Tea Party/MAGA type, but seem to have come back to their roots over the last few years. However the commenters are consistently still MAGA types.
It predated the actual MAGA label. As the Tea Party shifted from libertarian to Libertarian to "Libertarian" (with about 5 extra pairs of air quotes) they trended with it. I remember I stopped reading when I started seeing pro-military, pro-police, pro-theocracy posts. A number of years later I looked again and they were gone, albeit the comments had remained as we both noted.
That may all be true, but it remains the case that every time I see a Reason link being thrown around it's one of these kinda suspect things. You know this is a junk piece. They ran it anyway. Again: how much work does it take to assign a journalist and call the police department to verify the arrest records?
I didn't believe you (because my blood boiled too) but then I decided to search for this story in Google (without using names but just the incident and location) and didn't find any reputed news organization reporting it, which admittedly surprised me. I found a similar case where parents got in trouble for letting kids walk around alone[0], but not this case (and considering the specifics here are bound to touch the nerves of parents and practically guarantee viewership, I would think that it would be pretty attractive piece to print for them assuming it was found to be genuine).
Not trying to agree/disagree but just sharing what I noticed.
The fact that you couldn't find it reported in another "reputed news organization" doesn't mean it didn't happen. News organizations only have limited bandwidth and the extreme power that police and CPS has in these kinds of situations isn't exactly a secret nationally. Maybe the reputed news organizations simply don't consider it news? Or maybe the organizations aren't as reputed as you believe? There are many explanations for the lack of corroborating reporting here that don't imply the original story isn't true.
> The fact that you couldn't find it reported in another "reputed news organization" doesn't mean it didn't happen.
But that's not the standard for good journalism! You appear to be saying we should believe this story in Reason despite the long delay from the events, uncorroborated evidence, and clear bias of the author... because we can't prove it's false?
No, that's wrong. The correct way to interpret the data is that this is a suspect piece of writing that someone should try to verify before trusting.
> But that's not the standard for good journalism! You appear to be saying we should believe this story in Reason despite the long delay from the events, uncorroborated evidence, and clear bias of the author... because we can't prove it's false?
Maybe - however, we are expected to do our own due diligence for trustworthiness of news and considering that we have limited time and resources at our disposal, one has to set some sort of an approach to do so - in my case, reputed news organisation it is (and people are free to disagree with that approach).
Using this approach doesn't mean that whatever doesn't get printed in NYT or WaPo or doesn't get covered on CNN didn't happen but considering police overreach is a hot topic in recent times with prevalent extensive coverage, it is possible but not probable that something like this (involving kids, which makes it a more "newsworthy" story) hasn't been reported, in any of the major news outlets, just because of undue influence of Police/CPS.
I can't really speak to this article, and as they've changed the family's name(s) for privacy reasons it's hard to fact check, but other stuff published by Lenore Skenazy about similar cases seems more readily verifiable. That said I don't really pay much attention to this type of story so I'm not well versed on the issue or who is credible in reporting on it. But for issues I do follow, I usually find their reporting to be excellent.
I haven't been able to find any reporting about this story[0] till this Reason piece, so I'd be curious to understand their journalistic process in putting this together.
I was probably taking you too literally. I thought you were talking about links to arrest records, which I pretty much never see. I may be not looking closely enough for those links.
Right, just verification is all that's needed. "Killingly police records confirm Rivers was arrested on January 77th" or whatever. Or maybe "Killingly police confirm Rivers was detained briefly, but note that he was never arrested". Anything like that would be great. Even "Reached for comment, Killingly police were unable to confirm Rivers' arrest, but would not deny the arrest occurred" would at least be something.
But failing to even get that far tells me that either the author doesn't care about whether this is true (not unlikely given her day job), or that they're deliberately hiding something (maybe "Killingly police deny the arrest and have no record of the interaction with Rivers").
> In general, centralization of power leads to unequal society.
Your axe grinding doesnt make sense here. Police powers are one of the most federated types of power in the country! And these sound like they were the smallest unit of police, town police.
In fact, its difficult to imagine the more centralized police causing this type of trouble. Can you imagine a state trooper wasting time with this? Or the FBI investigating a child walking alone?
France has "federalized" police in most of the country and they don't have this problem. I'm with you, that doesn't seem to be the causal factor.
I don't have great insight into police, but I've had a little into a few county governments and school districts, and the impression I've gotten is the opposite: the more local interested are insulated from state or federal oversight (de facto, if not de jure) the more wildly-corrupt and tyrannical they get.
> It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.
Yep. TFA: "that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them" -- Police should be arresting the shit out of those criminals, not innocent people.
Congratulations, police, by arresting innocent parents you just traumatized some kids, and if they become criminals because they grew up in foster care missing their actually good parents, you have blood on your hands. (I know they dropped charges, but in the shitty slow legal system we have, it's a real possibility this could have played out differently.)
Fix the town so innocent people can live sane lives in it.
This is a very good point. Our society is more dangerous (giving them the premise, this might not be the case in actuality) because of their ineptitude and corruption.
They asked us to disarm ourselves, they asked us to trust them, to give them the power to police our behavior, then we do and our societies become less safe. Then they use this as a justification to tell us how to raise our kids.
If society is less safe it's their fault. So they either need to fix the problem or go get a job at McDonalds, either way leave me the fuck alone and don't tell me how to raise my kids.
I think that centralization of power is a spurious correlation. It may be part of the equation, but there is more to it.
Norway has a single national police organization which extends the local level. It is well-regarded by the citizens who are also big on free-range parenting. In Oslo you can find teenagers practicing skateboard on the steps of parliament during the day. On the other hand Americans might find certain means of protective services, for adults and for minors, overreaching.
Also, didn't absolutely everybody in the US rally around James Comey, during his unjust firing?
They should hang in the public square on the very next Sunday, it’s the only thing that will truly change anything at this point. You might think this is extreme but I welcome you to come back in 5-10 years and read it again and see what you think.
The police were just overreacting bro. They still had good intent and I applaud them for taking the initiative to combat rampant child sex trafficking that is almost never fought against these drays. From the judge's point of view, since a cop was feeding them info, of course the judge will side closer to the cop.
Christ, calm down a bit. Stupid shit happens, but the article not about that - they stimulus'd and you response'd exactly as intended. Get some insight into them and yourself or you're going to be easily manipulable forever.
> This is unacceptable. This is Eastern bloc level authoritarianism.
Nope it's just good old fashioned American police state activities. Once again people on this website love this subtle form of American Exceptionalism where they Pretend that America is not the most oppressive and destructive racist country in history.
If you were a A person of color fighting for your rights, a Communist, or any other ideological enemy of the United States you would realize that this activity from the police is nothing more than a generalization of the official policies of police towards "undesirables" in the 20th century.
Did you even read that case? Are you under the impression a traffic stop is equal to being arrested? The guy was convicted of COCAINE TRAFFICKING and arrested for that. Which means there's a law in place for COCAINE TRAFFICKING.
I feel like you just googled that and pasted what the search result.
Even if your assumption was true it's still the fault of legislators that have allowed the executive branch that much leeway to act outside of the written law. You ought to study the 3 branches of government.
OTOH, you could argue the opposite. It made the news (even if the source in this case is especially biased, I will assume good faith). In a country the size of the US, some amount of official misbehavior is going to happen with some regularity, it's just a numbers game. I'll worry more when we stop hearing about it.
> This makes my blood boil. It's obvious that Killingly cops are just bored assholes on complete power trips.
Without talking to them, I'm not sure that's a fair conclusion.
Regardless, IMHO the real culprit is vagueness / ambiguity in the applicable laws. Which means the legislators are at fault. And in a democracy, ultimately the voters.
Bullshit. Police in america are able to exercise discretion, which means they could (and should) have laughed at the order to arrest these parents and not carried it out, or at least just went and talked to them instead. They decided to arrest them instead, in all likelihood because it makes them feel powerful.
How can you seriously think this is anyone’s fault but the cops? Blaming politicians is one thing and they absolutely are to blame for a lot of our policing problems, but blaming “voters” for cops being assholes is just ridiculous.
It's not an either or bud, it's both. IF you are allowing laws in place that these police officers are able to use as justification then your government is just as at fault as the officers. It's pure idiocy not to blame both. Where do you think the officers get their power from? It's like you're failing to reach the logical conclusion and blunting your own thought process because you hate cops.
Cops AND the government giving them the power to do stuff like this are both to blame.
The laws don't actually have to exist. Cops can arrest you if they just say they thought it was the law and that the believed they had the right to enforce it. They can totally make it up. So while you may not be convicted of violating a made up law you still have to deal with all the consequences of the arrest. No ramifications for the cops at all. They have virtually unlimited power.
They don't hold up in court if that's the case and they get sued out of existence or imprisoned in many cases. This is just a flat out false assumption especially in today's climate.
The city government can remove powers from these officers as well. The legislative branch is responsible for writing laws in a way that don't allow the executive branch (leo's) that much leeway. They are just as at fault for letting this exist. YOU are electing the wrong people to your local government office if officer's are able to function that far outside of the law with no repercussions.
I think you'd have a pretty hard case arguing that police officer's are just getting away with acting outside the law over the past couple years.
The supreme court actually decided this. Cops just have to think they are enforcing the law. Cops for the most part cannot be personally sued due to qualified immunity. Tax payers just cover any litigation losses. Vast majority of times cops break the law there are no repercussions. The latest high profile cases are an exception. Even when committing an egregious act and charged, cops are often found not guilty.
So your fix is to do nothing and complain? Sounds like a great plan.
Maybe stop living in places that are run this way?
Who let the supposed powerful police unions get that way? The police are an arm of the government. You will change nothing by targeting the result of government overreach instead of the cause.
Lol, I have no idea why you are so angry at me. I have no plans at all to address the issue. I'm not going to pack up my kids and move out of America. How do you think I am personally going to change the government? I very much think you are confusing me, a regular guy with someone who has much much more power.
Congratulations though on personally solving all government problems wherever you live.
You don't care that police are just going rogue with the law and killing people with no recourse?
Why are you even commenting on this thread at all then?
If I really thought that I would get the fuck out instantly or do my best to fix it. A place like that isn't somewhere I'd willingly live, and I certainly wouldn't want my children growing up in that environment. Are you saying you're ok with your kids potentially getting killed by these rogue cops?
Personally, I think either you weren't serious with your comments, or you're now realizing that what you said doesn't hold water.
lol, amigo if you live in the United States then you are living in it to.
You are so angry at me for not doing anything to stop something that affects the entire country.
Or are you angry because i say its an issue and you have chosen to ignore it as one?
Of course I care about it, I never said I didn't. I said there is nothing I can do about it and that I am not going to try.
Oh ok, that upset you but yelling bullshit in your comments with no objective data to back your statements up is fine? You need to chill. Maybe use your anger vote in someone who doesn't allow your police officers to act this way?
Sorry, but no. Common sense is enough to realize that this is a ridiculous situation, no matter what the law says. You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters. And if their concerns were real rather than just a pretext for a powertrip they'd keep an eye out instead of making it impossible for children to lead a normal life.
> You can't lay the acts of specific police officers at the door of legislators and voters.
I'm not. In this situation, there were (at least) two necessary conditions for the arrest to happen:
(1) The law was written in a way that led the police to believe a crime had occurred.
(2) The police chose to perform the arrest.
If either of those conditions weren't true, then I don't think this incident would have happened.
It's entirely possible that the police exercised lousy judgment in this case. I'm simply reserving judgment until I hear their side of the story.
I brought up (2) for several reasons. First, I think it's BS to create politically sticky situations for police, and then skapegoat them things turn out badly. (Imagine the news coverage if they didn't arrest the parents in a situation like this, and then the kids were abducted.)
Second, I don't see how, in a democratic form of government, citizens can avoid responsibility for the state of their laws. If the laws are outside their control, it's not a democracy.
Again. No. Police officers have their own brains and make their own decisions on a case-by-case basis, not every weird interpretation of a law needs to lead to an arrest.
'Imagine' is a nice pre-amble to a strawman: that didn't happen.
What did happen is ridiculous, and regardless of the citizens having a very indirect say in the laws that get made to make them first cause rather than the police officers (and their immediate superiors) is - frankly - ridiculous.
I really wonder why you would bend over backwards to find excuses for something like this, it doesn't pass the beginnings of a common sense test. Having your parents arrested because you're walking on the streets as a child makes zero sense, no matter what the law says and no police officer with half a brain should make that arrest. Arrests are for criminals, worst case if they really wanted to test the law they could have simply cited the parents and then they'd have their day in court, this is simply a power play of the very worst kind.
> (1) The law was written in a way that led the police to believe a crime had occurred.
The fact that charges were never brought means that the law very likely wasn't written in a way that a reasonable person would believe a crime had occurred. Certainly the DA's office did not believe a crime worth indicting had occurred.
The police (executive branch) are the ones who decide what and how to enforce as evidence by the fact they dropped the charges. We live in a very vague world and have to use our own judgement on things as laws cannot contain the full context necessary to make those judgements. Do you truly expect an elected official from a city across the state or across the country to understand the relationship between you and your neighbors or the structure of your town? If there is truly so much crime that it is unsafe for children to walk to a store unsupervised than that points more at a failing of the police but we know that police do not prevent crime[1].
> The police (executive branch) are the ones who decide what and how to enforce as evidence by the fact they dropped the charges. We live in a very vague world and have to use our own judgement on things as laws cannot contain the full context necessary to make those judgements.
I have two counterpoints.
1) We haven't heard the police officer's side of things. All we're going on is one news story, which didn't even interview them. So we simply have no idea what additional factors they may have considered. I think it's irresponsible to pass judgment on them until getting more info.
2) I agree that laws need to be written with some discretion left to the judiciary. However, there's been enough media coverage on this general topic over the years, that Connecticut voters have had a chance to refine the laws. E.g., to modify the laws to clarify that kids are permitted to roam free in public places. But they didn't.
You’re getting downvoted but what you’re saying is kinda true. What typically spurned these laws was an actual tragedy: a parent had their child run to the store to buy something, child was abducted, family was devastated, and then worked to pass some law that makes it illegal for children under a certain age to be unaccompanied by an adult. Well-meaning but ultimately way too restrictive: what happened to their child was a freak tragedy, not a common occurrence.
Personally, as a parent, I hate these laws. I want my son to be able to explore the neighborhood, have fun, do outside chores etc without myself or my wife monitoring him. Imo forcing parents to be glued to their kids 24/7 makes life more stressful for everyone.
Bad laws notwithstanding, I think GP getting downvoted for giving police the benefit of the doubt. In today's America, I think it's fair to be a skeptic first when it comes to the cops.
Skeptic yes, but OP passed hard judgement. If OP would have speculated or suggested a possible cause, that would be healthy skepticism. OP is dripping with bias and preconceived notion.
There is no going back though. No politician is going to risk repealing this type of law and then have their career destroyed when a single crime happens against a kid that this law would have "prevented".
People bashing the cops for this is bullshit too. The cops are the bad guys either way. They enforce the law and they are the bad guys. Something happens to a kid with this law in place and then they are also the bad guy for not doing their job.
The solution to all this is simply to not have children. It is just another of the near daily reminders of how great it is to be child free.
Rivers tried to explain to the caseworker that the police had overreacted, but the caseworker maintained that the parents had somehow jeopardized their kids safety. When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.
Fuck the police, but if these are the social workers I keep hearing about who are supposed to make everything better, we’re never going to have competent policing in america. What the fuck is it with government employees and trying to ruin people’s lives over nothing?
And people wonder why there is a stigma and general reluctance to get help like therapy. Even if it were completely free, it can still have a cost and be used against you.
Exactly. I think that for some folks out there who are struggling, they're not necessarily hesitating to get help they need out of shame or wounded sense of pride. But because they've correctly assessed the risks of it being weaponized against them.
I can imagine a world where culture gets better in 20, 30 years and we look back at the 2020s and say "yikes, good thing it's not like that anymore."
Unfortunately the social workers are just police without guns. They have the same law enforcement problem: the people who apply for the jobs are the ones who want to abuse people. They aren't servants of the law, they want to use the law as a weapon. The good social workers are in private clinics and schools.
Law Enforcment social workers should be drafted from the general practice pool like jury duty.
The problem is that making the government responsible (and liable) creates an incentive for government employees and departments to overreact and treat every situation as harshly as possible, because if they were ever to be reasonable and lenient, and a child were to be abused later, they would then be blamed.
The only real solution is to take that sort of administrative discretion out of the hands of as many government employees as possible. Leave that discretion to judges.
The problem is that whenever these types of abuses go to court, the judicial branch has consistently given wide amounts of discretion to the executive branch of government unless the legislature has explicitly limited it. We need more legislators that are willing to dictate the limits of power to the executive, but that just hasn't happened in a long time.
Also, most of what they do is under threat of authority, not actual authority. For the most part, they need a court order to enter your home, question your children without your permission, etc. Hopefully if more people realize they have the right to say no, then the worker will be a little more reasonable. Right now they know that everyone they meet bends to their threats and nobody challenges them, so they are emboldened.
Right. I don't want to blame the parents, but all they had to do was deny the case workers entry and an interview, and say come back with a warrant or when my attorney is present. That would have saved a lot of headache and been well within their rights.
It goes one of two ways. One is that they don't have probable cause that abuse has occurred and nothing happens. Police dropping the charges seem to support this for this scenario. The other is that they do get the order and you have the same situation of visits and questions.
I had a friend who had a false report made against her by her husbands ex-wife to Florida DCF after they refused to babysit the ex-wifes' profoundly disabled child (by her new husband) while the ex-wife went out partying.
A social worker showed up demanding to enter my friends home. My friend was a paralegal and was aware of her rights and told the social worker to come back with a warrant if she wanted to enter the home. No doubt extremely offended about the false report, I'm sure she was not polite about it.
The worker contacted the sheriffs office and they got a judge to sign off on an emergency order by saying the lives of the children were at risk. The social worker returned with multiple law enforcement officers who broke down the door of the home, entered with with guns drawn, terrorizing her children, cuffed and arrested her. No charges were filed.
The worker continually harassed my friend for most of a year with numerous additional incidents before the friend was able to obtain a court order barring Florida DCF from contacting her or her family, and restraining the worker from contact specifically. You could say that eventually she "won", but it's was a hollow victory in that it came at a cost she couldn't really afford and caused harm for which there could be no compensation.
There are rights you have on paper and then there are the actual consequences in reality if you try to stand up for them. When you're facing a petty dictator with almost complete power over your life and almost no accountability for their actions it can be pragmatic to play along and not risk inspiring a vendetta.
Did the social worker lose their job? It sounds like if they had multiple issues and there was a restraining order, then they should have. If so, they removed one abusive social worker. Without that, that social worker would continue to do similar things to others. I'm guessing the emergency order was granted without supporting evidence (ie illegally by the social worker made things up).
Also, there's a big difference in how you invoke those rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem. Probably the best thing to do is ask for their card, say that you want to help and that you'll have your attorney contact them. If there's a claim of immediate danger, a quick show of your kids being happy and unharmed should suffice.
The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered. The system will never improve unless people hear about these abuses. That itself is highly valuable, even if the personal cost is high.
Certainly not initially, DCF backed them up. Maybe eventually? I'd ask but the friend passed away a number of years ago. This happened just pre-internet enough that it's not well documented online.
> The main point is, if everyone just rolls over, these abuses and terrible bureaucrats will not be uncovered.
That's true but it doesn't mean that standing up works out for the betterment of you and your family.
Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of themselves. I'm grateful for those who do.
> Also, there's a big difference in how you invoke those rights. If you get aggressive, that can be a problem.
More precisely, if you're perceived as being aggressive it's a problem. The distinction is important because we have less control over how we're perceived than how we act-- particularly because an important characteristic (perhaps even defining) of abusive bureaucrats is perceiving anything short of complete submission as an attack.
"Not everyone has the freedom to make a martyr of themselves."
True, but without knowledge that saying no is an option, those people effectively don't have a choice, and you end up with few people volunteering to stand up.
"More precisely, if you're perceived as being aggressive it's a problem."
Also true, but with today's technology it's fairly easy to document the interaction. If the official's account is a lie, then you've got them. If it's not an outright lie, you have a record for an object 3rd party to rule on (although there are plenty of bad judges too).
Your friend saved a lot of other parents during that time.
Thankfully I have not been terrorized by DCS but having been terrorized by police, I at least knew standing up for my rights meant those police were tied up with me for hours to days on end rather than terrorizing dozens of push-overs in the same time. I had a scenario recently where two tyrants were forced to babysit me for almost a full day, which meant that probably 200 push-overs who could be worked over in 15 minutes each were saved thanks to my standing up for my rights. When everyone invokes their rights the system locks up.
I mean maybe? I had a court order served against me for something non-child related. The order was obvious bullshit. The drones involved in executing it were gnashing at the teeth to do what it said but by the time they were delayed hours getting the judge to approve it, their gusto was gone and they started pondering their own precarious legal situation when they would inevitably find what they did was bullshit and unjustified and they'd be looking at a massive lawsuit. They were smart not to too, because I'm quite certain they would have found nothing and counsel I would later invoke would uncover the warrant was not obtained in a legal manner.
It got them to back off even though they had the order in hand with the judge's signature.
Funny enough part of the Defund the police push essentially was implying social workers were the answer (granted more about mental health than child protection services). Still, the point is it seems every agency has their knee to the neck of americans so to speak.
Kinda reminds me of the song Dystopia Now by Mental Minority[1] which quotes George Orwell's 1984 "If You Want a Picture of the Future, Imagine a Boot Stamping on a Human Face – for Ever"
I felt like I learned something when I saw a list of average GRE scores by fields of study and social workers were at the absolute bottom, well below others.
While I'm sure that many have genuine compassion for others, this doesn't change the fact that many are literal morons who have been given incredible authority to interfere with the lives of others. What could possibly go wrong?
Can you please at least find and link to this list before you call hundreds of thousands of low-paid highly educated essential workers "literal morons"?
Thanks. Looking at the numbers, Verbal is a bit below average but above other fields that you might not consider filled with morons, like CS and electrical engineering. Quant is indeed the lowest but also the least important for the field. Maybe that's the only one you were looking at? Writing is above average.
Going by the percentiles here https://www.ets.org/pdfs/gre/snapshot-test-taker-data-2016.p... they are indeed below the Verbal and Quant medians, Writing is unclear. Overall it does not come close to the "literal moron" bar, especially since they are presumably aware that Quant skills are unimportant for the field so they don't need to focus on it much.
I agree that "literal moron" is inflammatory. I definitely would not trust the communication skills of the average software engineer to navigate a situation where a child's life is potentially at stake either! This is supposed to be what a social worker excels at.
Social workers also score poorly on communication skills, in aggregate.
I'll happily agree that my description was extremely critical-- more than it needed to be--, but we should hold anyone whit the authority to invade our lives with minimal oversight or accountability to an extremely high standard. What what I've seen, we've often failed to do so.
We don't send our best out to become law enforcement or social workers. These are extremely difficult, even dangerous jobs, and we fantastically underpay them.
I’ll note this every time this kind of story comes up: it’s good and correct to direct ire at the police here, but it’s also not the end of the story. The story also continues through America’s isolationist and atavistic car culture: you simply don’t see this kind of bloodthirst for “protecting children” in countries (or even areas within the US) with sensible urban design and correspondingly shifted expectations about the public.
This should not be read as an excuse, but as an analysis of how we prevent these kinds of absurd individual violations at their root: the police in so many parts of the US derive power from the latent fear of strangers that comes with car-dependent living. Remove that source of fear and power, and the public becomes less tolerant of state kidnappings.
It's not just a matter of car-dependent living. Suburbs have been around since the 50s and yet, 20-30 years ago, we didn't live in this constant fear of danger lurking on every suburb sidewalk. Media (regular media and social media) amplification of every single tragedy that ever happens to anyone anywhere has created this culture of fear. When I was a kid, we walked or rode our bike to school, or to the ice cream shop, without everyone being up in arms about it. It's no more dangerous now than it was then -- in fact, it's probably safer -- but our perception of society as a dangerous place has grown tremendously. It's a horrible way to live. I want my kids to be smart street and not naive, but I don't want them to live in fear.
I'd go a step further, which technologists will fail to accept, since it's essentially an animistic argument. Cars, very specifically, the actual physical _thing_ are evil technology. In absolute terms, in absence of their application.
Americans don't recognize it as such. We see it just as a tool. It is not. Cars have their own force field and it has changed our minds, our bodies, our relationships to other, our dispositions.
Once americans recognize it as such, we can see change. It's not impossible. From my visits to Europe, the difference is already night and day in so many places compared to just 10-15 years ago. If they can, we can. But it will be such a hard slog.
I've been reading a collection of Tom Wolfe's journalism from the 1960s[1], and it's fascinating to see how the car has warped from a liberating force (in the sense of propelling countercultures and shrinking the rural divide) to a domineering one (in terms of suburban fear culture and dependence).
These phenomena could be seen as incompatible on face value, but they're really just two phases in the same arc: the children of these articles' subjects grew up in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself, and built systems to enshrine it.
Thank you for the recommendation. Looking forward to read it!
> in a culture that confuses the mechanism of liberation (the car) with liberation itself,
It's essentially reification. I often think modernity is fully characterized by it. The inability to divorce aspirational visions from its material implementation. It's essentially the disappearance of imagination. We no longer can imagine because we are tethered to a material anchors. This is why something like a flying car can be imagined, but not something vague like virtuous personal mobility. The first is tangible, the latter is a diffuse constellation of technologies, mindset, systems, behaviors.
Pulling down that threat, (just going down the rabbit hole here), but this process has been playing out for 150 years now. Commoditization of everything. Making tangible the wealth of human experience. If it cannot be made as a marketable object, it cannot exist, cannot be imagined.
This is a fascinating discussion. Maybe something to consider is that American society is a lot more individualistic than other cultures. And that individualism is facilitated by distance - after all, proximity forces interaction: even if no on talks or communicates your brain is still processing the other presence(s), it's a cognitive load.
And the car is a consequence of that culture, not the cause. In present day and age, that tension between less and more interaction doesn't go away - it simply precipitates into cities and rural areas. The car may be unsuitable in the former, and a necessity in the latter. Tier 3 and 4 cities or communities, like the one in question, are in a constant tug of war between these opposing forces. Sure, the car itself, like any other tool, may change the society it operates within in fundamental ways, but when has that not been true for any society anywhere in place and time? And at the end of the day, has any society, of significant size, been able to eliminate a significant tool altogether from use?
Even European cities don't ban vehicles, they disincentivize their use through a combination of factors, starting with making them unnecessary. The only time a significant tool has been eliminated from use is when it has been supplanted by another - horse & buggy comes to mind.
So it goes with cars. Maybe those will be supplanted by public self-driving/flying on-demand transport in both urban and rural areas. But that won't change the tension between less and more interaction that determines how people spread out - that comes from a more fundamental property of living beings interacting with one another and the natural variation in biology/brains of people.
That brings us around to the original point - the root cause of "bloodthirst for protecting children". As many other commenters have noted - this lack of kids roaming is a recent phenomenon in the US over the past 2-3 decades, while cars have been around for 10 or so, and in widespread use for 7 or more. And the pendulum appears to be swinging in the other direction with many legislatures taking up the right to let kids roam.
Looking at the combination of those 2 factors - cars' lengthy history at the interplay of human interaction, and kids not roaming' being a transitory phenomenon, I'm having a really hard time drawing a connection between the "latent fear of strangers" coming from "car-dependent living". In fact, I would argue that the fear of losing a child in an urban setting with more strangers around would be far stronger than a stranger driving in from outside and making off with a child.
And police brutality has also been around much longer than has the lack of kids roaming. In fact, kids roaming is just another in a long litany of excuses for projection of power from police or any kind of uniformed service.
This makes me think that the connections between "bloodthirst for protecting children" and "latent fear of strangers" coming from "car-dependent living" might be a bit tenous. I would like to see more actual evidence for that before accepting it at face value.
I could even argue that the bloodthirst for protecting children is likely more related to the declining birth rate - fewer children means each individual one is valued more in nuclear families - split attention is a real phenomenon. Another factor could be greater awareness and depiction in popular US media of crime and the horrors that taken children undergo.
While we’re on the topic, I would add TVs to the list of evil objects. With a book, if you don’t like the content, you can stop reading at any time. But with a TV, anyone in the vicinity is coerced into keep listening and turning the TV off, even when the content is extremely disturbing, while others are watching is considered faux pas.
kind of agree, but there are ways to improve it. Public transit can be an example where it (in some places and countries) mixes socio economic classes, maybe save for the highest wealth...
Additionally things like Cruise's driverless car can make driving more social again. Imagine being able to play a game or have a casual cup of coffee with a friend over a commute.
I think you missed the point: the claim was that the obsession over safety (partially the kind that manifests in cases like this) is the culmination of a robust car culture. Things like this obviously don't happen overnight; they require decades of normalization (and, for car culture in particular, alienation).
This is exactly my point: "drug dealers and sex offenders" are on your mind, despite the US being an overwhelmingly safe and criminally uneventful place. Car culture encourages fixation on crime and risk, even when all available evidence points to the US being a radically safer place than it was even 30 years ago[1].
We're still not a safe country on an absolute scale (relative to our economic and social peers), but our cultural histrionics around crime are unsupported by the actual trendline.
The two are intertwined! "If it bleeds, it leads" works especially well on low-trust societies, and car culture enables and enforces low-trust social growth.
Put another way: the media might be a primary driver of the problem, but American culture is uniquely susceptible to it because of car dependence and the cultural/demographic structures that dependence incentivizes.
So can I, but I can't think of many that share the magnitude and ubiquity of cars!
(You shouldn't read this as a fixation or totem: there are plenty of other problems in this country. But it isn't a coincidence that aggressive deurbanization/suburbanization is closely tracked by increases in isolation, which in turn is tracked by a decline in personal trust[1].)
I can: the destruction of religion as a civic activity in the US. I'm not even religious but that's a huge one.
Another is the effort (by HUD and others) to eliminate regions of ethno-cultural homogeneity.
Both of these are A) much more numerically significant (on a per-capita basis) than changes in vehicle use since, say, 1950 and B) well-understood to reduce social factors like trust and cohesion.
This was my first thought. Didn't even think about the cops, they do what they do, but they're operating in a culture, not that they're not wrong, but it's stupid all the way down. If I lived in Berlin and my kid wanted to ride their bike to the Dunkin Doughnuts in fucking Amsterdam, I'd tell them to update me every so often over the next couple days, and let me know if you quit and need to get the train home, but I'd wish them well and send them on their way.
That's also not to say that there's no car dependency there, but it's not as ruthless and overbearing.
I live in rural/small town area in Japan that is not designed well and most adults have a car, but children go elementary school by walking. This is standard here. Sensible urban design isn't minimum requirement.
uhh no the blatant problem here is american mentality where everything is illegal by default including breathing and walking. breathing is only legal because it's necessary to survive. walking is legal but only on certain areas of land. you HNers display this mentality every single day with your latest "oh cookies should be illegal" and "oh AI should be illegal" nonsense. your narrative about car culture (the first time i heard this one) is insane and probably some left wing talking point or something, i don't read the news. normies have that pathetic mentality you describe regardless of cars. call it american mentality, not car mentality, although it's actually the same in all countries (including whatever "well designed" city like oslo or whatever you have in mind), but america invented it. tl;dr the disease is statism, not car culture.
Leaving aside the parts of this argument not worth dealing with (that is, most of them), you make the fundamental carbrain error. How do you think interstates, suburban development, and countless square miles of public roads and public parking came to be? The answer (and it's an extremely easy one to find because it's less than a hundred years old) is massive amounts of public investment. There's no universe in which virtuously libertarian (TM) private money would have done the same thing. So while the midwit impulse is to bifurcate "statism" and "car culture" and call one a "left wing talking point", they are at the very least not exclusive. There's mutual causation, of course, but I have no desire to open that chapter under this comment.
i didn't say the car culture cause is mutually exclusive to statism. the problem is statism, regardless of car culture. the thread does bring up a good point about the average idiot who will fall over and die the moment his company stops paying him enough for his car, but that's not the issue. the main problem here is statism, and not just statism, but extreme statism. every country today follows an extreme form of statism, not just some reasonable moderate version. this is why a cop in america has to have a gun, for instance.
and you display it perfectly, i reject the mentality where breathing has to be illegal and we all suffocate until someone makes an exception for it to be legal, and in return you use "libertarian" as an insult, like a typical wingnut. whatever, you guys can enjoy your pointless 4chan teenager tier pontificating over the connection of car culture to what will end as police cameras being installed in our homes, while i sit back and read another article about how i'm right where a 15 year old goes to jail for "misusing a computer" because computers have to be used correctly or else its illegal due to the fact that you don't live in an enlightened state like you think you do but you just look to me the same way you think some reactionary hell in the middle east looks.
actually, here's a better way to put it. the average person is a coward and will instantly agree with any law that purports to fight some problem that looks legit. he's also a consumer, and will buy any law that alleges to make his life more convenient. that is how law is treated today, and why we pay for way more police than necessary as well as why they think they can go make up new problems to fight. it really is that simple, after all, you either believe covid is a hoax or you believe that elementary school children need to learn that two males can have sex. none of you deserve to be taken seriously like the adults you think you are. this is a forum of webdevs who have an inflated sense of intellect due to their wage who can program as good as a 15 year old PHP hacker, after all.
People already install police cameras in their home. They have a corporate logo on them and are sold as a product with certain benefits. Of course, since we live in a world of nation states, there's some point at which Amazon interacts with them...
When I was a kid, I spent 3 hours outside with the neighbors kids every weekday after finishing my homework. On weekends it was more like 8 at the park. I consider it a forming experience for me as a person. I was safe but also was able to explore and get exercise.
Society’s urge to make everything indoor and sedentary is detrimental. It has negative health effects. It also removes any idea of community when you can’t go out and explore what is around you. That’s even before you think about freedom of movement.
This specter of unlimited liability must make the idea of becoming a parent quite daunting.
You need to secure not only housing, food, and energy, but also 24/7 supervision, in the form of daycare, after daycare activities, after school activities, or one parent being with the kids at all times. Which means you are especially screwed if there is a divorce, so you probably want backup grandparents and aunts/uncles, if they can afford to be available and near you.
I often tell people that a child takes up an infinite amount of time and resources.
But one counterpoint on divorce. If you can manage to do it well, split custody, and continue to co-parent effectively, then you get to be a devoted parent spending every waking moment and spare penny taking care of your kids… for half of the time. And then you get to spend the other half of your time as a single adult.
It’s not a sales pitch, and I think in most cases it doesn’t work out so well, but getting divorced and equally sharing the children has been world-changing for me in terms of balance and getting time to focus on myself and fulfill my own dreams in terms of travel, hobbies, bucket list, etc.
In our case there was never any extended family who would ever take the kids, which is another thing that’s becoming more common. So basically from Day 1 until off to college you are providing full-time child rearing, which can be quite the crucible.
I don't know how old you are, but I did much the same quite often and want to add: For me at least, it was without a cellphone.
I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
I used to take the train to another town and then a bus, just to get to school every day, as a kid (i.e. 10-12). This was before cellphones, and I doubt I even had money for a payphone on me. I was fine and it was perfectly normal. Of course this was in France, not the U.S. so quite different in terms of cultural acceptance. It was before the concept of sex offenders (and a host of other dangers) really exploded in the media, which I believe was the big shift in everyone's minds (this idea of a pervert or kidnapper lurking behind every corner).
> I think even a lot of people old enough to have kids these days don't realise how many of us spent hours not just roaming around freely, but roaming around freely with no way for our parents to contact us or know where we were.
How so? they would have grown up that way themselves? -- I don't think it was common for children to have cell phones until after 2000, no? Median age for first time mothers in the US is 30.
Combination of the freedom to run around like those of us who grew up a decade or two earlier being given to them later with that freedom more likely to coincide with getting a phone or at least being near in time.
E.g. someone getting a phone at 10 in 2003 would be 30 this year already had a substantial likelihood of having had less freedom to run around at 10 in 2003 than I had at 8 in 1983, or indeed at 6-7. (I'm by no means suggesting every 10 year old in 2003 were getting phones).
It's very possible that the number is smaller than I'm imagining. It was merely a casual observation that we're now also increasingly starting to come across parents who grew up either being watched or being reachable, so the notion of kids being able to not just roam freely but roam freely without at least being able to call to say where they were is getting stranger to more and more people.
Cellphones were used to make it extraordinarily convenient for busybodies to snitch at all moments. Any increased freedom of the child to roam by virtue of having emergency communication was nixed by the ability for any passer by to immediately call police for unsupervised children without even the inconvenience of driving to a pay phone.
All the places I played alone as a kid: the playground, the rural creek, the open fields. It was inconvenient for adults to snitch me out from there. Not so anymore.
Fair enough. I wonder when the change happened, as someone born in 1979 in Ft. Lauderdale I had the same freedom (even requirement!) to go out on my own as a child that many posters have mentioned here.
The insane part is that those police officers and neighbours likely grew up in a community where they were able to have the freedom to go outside unsupervised. They all survived to adulthood and are now trying to snatch away those freedoms from the young. Disgraceful.
"Because it's not like it used to be," is the excuse I hear. Meanwhile crime is lower than it was 30+ years ago, or whatever generation these cops grew up in.
The common perception of "stranger danger" is a load of nonsense thanks to 90s infotainment, as well as John Walsh (of America's Most Wanted) for making up bullshit about tens of thousands of children being abducted by strangers (hint: it's not even in the thousands); the vast majority of child abuse and abductions are committed by familial connections, by far.
I hate that this is a self-perpetuating fear. The more people fear, the less people walk on the streets, which makes the neighbourhood appear less safe and vibrant.
It likely continues today via things like true crime podcasts. Listening to a long string of awful stories can leave one with the false sense that these things are common.
Even though I have an appreciation for some true crime content, I've come to really loathe most of it. Long ago, I was obsessed with Forensic Files, Unsolved Mysteries, etc. This was of course back before true crime podcasts and Netflix documentaries. I also got interested in forensics, criminal psychology, and helping to try and identify and locate decedents/missing people. My heart genuinely goes out to victims. But witnessing from afar the worst aspects of humanity eventually took a toll on me. That combined with the absolute state of the news media convinced me to quit consuming that stuff all together. I truly think it should be microdosed only, if at all.
What makes me loathe it now is I can see the psychological impact it has on others. I won't name names, but I've known a fair share of women who got into the new wave of true crime content and have significantly skewed views on men as a result. Women should be well aware of what a man is capable of and what to do to mitigate risk, but true crime content can create this picture that more men are criminally capable than is actually the case. Simultaneously, entirely from the women I know who watch true crime, I hear views suggesting that the common man is too weak or incompetent to intervene and stop bad men, which is also not representative. I'm only being vague here because if any of these people happen to read my comments, they'll know I'm talking about them, but others won't know.
Some may disagree with my perspective, but it's my honest impression. I've seen women in my life who are family members and colleagues get into true crime content and notice their views shift as a result. If it's said that porn can damage the views that men have of women, surely it's not such a large leap to believe that watching women get victimized over and over again by a small minority can impact one's views on men without even realizing it.
> His overly aggressive style prepares law enforcement officers for a job under siege, where they're front line troops who are "at war" with the streets. Officers need to be prepared to battle the communities they're told to protect, Grossman has said. And ideally in Grossman's eyes, officers need to learn to kill less hesitantly.
My friend married a guy who ended up becoming a cop. Within weeks of him starting training she sends me a snapchat about how "When we go places he always wants to sit facing the exit" and another of him quite literally playing with one of his service weapons, like a damn nerf toy.
Police training is garbage, and the police community is pathetic.
> "When we go places he always wants to sit facing the exit"
I mean this isn't bad advice. I was cornered by a large man once as a child and ever since I've tried to always be aware of an exit and ideally be in view of it.
Right!? I went out, by myself, walking through suburban and semiurban (Houston) as a young child in the 80s and 90s — easily far more dangerous in a practical sense: more crime, less ubiquitous cell phones, ...
This helicoptering is nuts. It's something my family does, which is especially weird from my parents: humans I wouldn't see for days due to their long work schedules and my boredom in the summer.
People used to talk about "The Popsicle Index"[1] which is the percentage of families in an area comfortable with letting an elementary school aged child walk to the nearest store and buy a popsicle on their own. These days parents don't get to make that decision, the entire community makes it for them. Any dissenting opinion can result in losing your kids.
My kids are 7 and 9 and walk to the corner store together (Somerville MA). They also walk to and from school, the park, and to friends' houses. The more kids do this the more normal it will seem to others, and we can slowly get society's sense of how old you need to be to walk places back to somewhere reasonable.
Unfortunately, city design alters people's perceptions of where it is acceptable to walk. I moved from walkable Vancouver to car-centric Mississippi, and I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.
> This was in Killingly, Connecticut, a suburban town in the northeast part of the state. The Rivers' lived near an elementary school, library, state police barracks, sidewalks, crosswalks, many Victorian-style homes, and the aforementioned donut shop. The kids gathered $7, and off they went.
Street View shows that the town looks quite walkable especially for suburban America. It just boggles my mind that people would consider calling the police on a 7 and 9 year old for walking on those streets.
> I already look at people with suspicion when they are walking on the road in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where their car is and why they are walking there.
Curiosity is probably a better word. There’s no way to get around without a car here so it’s just not the norm. So when someone is walking in the middle of the highway or down a dark road you naturally wonder why. If I grew up somewhere with a high crime rate I may actually be suspicious.
Somerville is basically as perfect a city as I've seen in the US for walking, for anyone! And thus the perfect beachhead to take back childhood independence.
Toddlers do not do this in Japan. People deeply misunderstand this show.
It's carefully monitored and setup. The kids don't know it. They are genuinely doing the things on their own. But it's not like the parents then rely on the kids to go do those things independently after the show.
They are more independent at a young age. But you don't see toddlers walking around Japan unattended to shops.
The article says this much too. While I never saw any actual toddlers running errands on their own in Japan, I did see children 5-6 years old doing it.
To be fair, when I send my 4 year old to the closest shop, my concerns have absolutely nothing to do with the safety of the environment (e.g. actions of others), and everything with how much I trust him not to be an idiot.
If we had a shop only two streets over it would be doable at that age.
It's well worth a watch to see how small kids act when they think they're not being observed. And also for the hilarious footage of how oblivious they (mostly) are of the swarms of camera people running in front of and after them...
My mom has a funny story about how my grandfather surprisingly didn't get arrested.
Back in West Germany, they had lived across from a bar, and every night my grandfather would send my mom and her older sister across the street to get some beer for him.
Then they moved to Ohio and rented an apartment down the block from the bar. And my grandfather sent two little girls who didn't speak any English to the bar for some beer.
Well, they came back with cops, who then had to fetch a neighbor who spoke more English than my grandparents to translate and explain the whole situation. The cops then left with a, "don't do that again" and that was the end of it.
The mind boggles at how quickly Opa would have been behind bars in 2023.
In Southern California in the late 80s / early 90s I had a few friends that were regularly sent to the corner store for cigarettes. They had to bring a note, but otherwise the store seemed to think this was normal.
I was in a small village pub in England one Boxing Day.
A man at the table next to ours handed a £10 note to his sons, who were about 8-10 years old. They went to the bar and asked for two Fantas or something like that. The bartender said "I can't serve you, you need to be 16".
Silence fell. It was a small room, and we'd all heard the boys ask.
The old man at the end of the bar said, "You'll serve the boys, John, or else you won't be seeing me in here again."
The boys got their Fantas.
(Checking the law now, the boys were clearly accompanied, and I see no reason the bartender shouldn't have served them. I think it may have been forbidden before 2003, when the rules distinguished between children "at the bar" or not, rather than the current rules which distinguish between accompanied and unaccompanied children. But even then, the bartender would have been applying a 'rough city bar' approach to a posh village pub.)
The kind of people who think it's reasonable to call the cops over a nothing-burger like this are simply a part the extremist long tail that is a product of middle/upper middle class culture that condones and encourages bucking everything to some external party whenever possible. When you exist in a bubble where everyone is patting each other on the back for calling the city over disputes that should at least be initially handled between neighbors, reporting petty business disputes to the state AG, calling a plumber to replace a toilet flapper, getting engineered drawings for a garden shed, etc, etc, it should come as no surprise that some people take this sort of responsibility to think for yourself outsourcing too far and call the cops on some kids walking down the street.
Of course dispatch and the police were behaving like idiots here too but they are clearly serving a community where responding to frivolous calls like this is the norm because if this one case was so outside of their normal purview it wouldn't have been handled the way it was.
And the DCF part, well that fact pattern just looks like a boring old case of bureaucratic incentives and ass covering. They were fishing for something to make the rest of the fact pattern look less unreasonable. And then when they found it they jumped right to some sort of remediable action so they could say "there, we did something, case closed".
>>"They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'" says Rivers.
So, of course, you arrest the parents and leave the sex-offenders and drug dealers roaming the street. Makes perfect sense.
There's one more layer, though: making you believe the streets aren't safe and we're not arresting enough people is the actual point of all this. America already locks up four times as many people as most countries, to little purpose besides control and profit.
It only takes a few times getting mugged, being subject to a car smash and grab, or being porch pirated to go from "we lock too many people up!" to "why aren't we locking these crazy people up?".
We are obviously messing up somewhere else before we throw people in jail.
It is kind of obvious that the guy who beat an Amazon employee in Beltown with a bat should be in jail right now, but they are considering releasing him [1]. You can walk out of a Target with a 65" TV and get bail with outstanding warrants [2]. I don't think Seattle is locking anyone up right now, to be honest, unless murder is involved.
You could just read the Seattle times, no secrets here, but it is pay walled.
Definitely conservatives pointing out these problems is the best way to get votes in ultra liberal Seattle, and they don’t need to make anything up. It isn't going to change us into Trump voters, but it can sway local elections.
Have you ever been to a prison? It’s not a randomly selected group. The majority of prisoners are in for serious violent offenses, easily confirmed by looking at the data or speaking to anyone who works in a prison.
The subtext is that the police don't do anything to prevent crime. You alone are responsible for what happens to you. And if you would choose willingly to do something the police officers think you shouldn't do, you deserve arrest.
Firearm training of police is laughable and probably worse than the casual shooter who goes to a range once a month.
The average cop probably quals once a year with his glock 19 and spends the rest of the year stroking it thinking about how he's billy badass because he has a badge. You can watch the videos, any real resistance and they go back screaming asking for 10 of their buddies to do the spray and pray. When they were hunting Dorner they were even unloading full standard mags on random trucks just loosely fitting the description and still not managing to incapacitate the occupants.
LAPD officers were guarding one of the officers on Dorner's manifesto hit list on Feb. 7, 2013 when a blue Toyota pickup truck allegedly matching the suspect's vehicle drove up to the scene. Police opened fire and aimed at least 100 rounds at the occupants of the truck who they mistakenly believed to be Dorner's.
Two women were delivering newspapers on Feb. 7, 2013, when LAPD officers guarding the Torrance home of a target named in an online manifesto blasted at least 100 rounds. Margie Carranza and her mother, Emma Hernandez, were wounded and rushed to local hospitals. Carranza suffered a minor bullet wound, and Hernandez was shot twice in the back and reported in stable condition.
Sorry, I meant in comparison to teenagers with switches on their glocks.
Cops are crap with their guns, but generally better than someone who has never trained at all and is waiting for a chance to shoot at something for the first time.
I'm well aware of the American hero, Chris Dorner, who exposed LAPD and genuinely made them feel fear that they may see consequence for the first time. His methods are up for debate but he's done something only lies about fentanyl has been able to do.
I think you’d see substantially more crime if the US incarcerated less people. The evidence is clear, released prisoners have a much higher rate of violent crime than the average person. I’m sort of confused where this meme that prisons don’t keep us safe comes from.
Removing people who commit violent crimes from the public should obviously decrease crime and I’ve never really heard a convincing counter argument. Usually when people make this claim they’re just badly misinformed and believe most prisoners are in jail for marijuana possession.
An ambivalent counter point. When I was growing up, I walked to school. Elementary school was just ten minutes away walking. There was a park also within ten minutes from our house and I was allowed to go alone even at the age of six.
I am totally for this. I don't like the idea of restricting children, I think it inhibits growth.
Still, I had my near miss, and I know others of my age that had near misses too. I walked to park alone after school. I got tired of swinging on the swing set and went to sit on the park bench. Soon a man came and sat right next to me. I was uncomfortable, I slid down the park bench away from him. He soon slid right next to me again, his leg and torso against mine. I remember him being warm and sweaty and I thought him weird. I got up and went back to the swings and from the swing set stared at him. He eventually got up and left.
As an adult, I'm fairly freaked out by what could have been a bad experience. I don't condone arresting parents that give their children free reign. I do understand the perspective just a little bit.
'a different world now', implying a more dangerous one than when these parents and police officers were kids. That's objectively false in the US; despite a modest increase in crime over the past five or so years, crime is much lower than 30-40 years ago. I am frustrated that a great many people seem to believe otherwise.
I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'"
Any cop who threatens retaliatory arrest because his feelings are hurt should be severely reprimanded, then fired and barred from police work if the behavior continues.
Same goes for airport security who casually threaten to add passengers to the no-fly list if they push back. Retaliatory abuse of power isn't acceptable.
It’s a crime to threaten to hurt someone with a weapon, I don’t see how this is any different. The culture of zero accountability for law enforcement is a symptom of a government that is systemically corrupt and has thrown out even the pretense of consent of the governed.
1) The police have no real criminals to arrest but need to do something to justify their existence. So they're harassing people over things that not only aren't crimes but are examples of good parenting that teaches kids to be independent. In this case, "defund the police" would genuinely be justified as they're clearly overfunded.
2) The police are refusing to do their job and arrest real criminals. Instead, they are harassing people over things that aren't crimes because those things are "unsafe" due to the refusal of police to do their job. In this case, the police need to be reformed so that they do what they're supposed to do.
Either way, the police should stick to arresting murderers, rapists and thieves to protect the fundamental freedom of decent people who respect the rights of others to use a public street whenever they want without fear of becoming a victim of violent criminals or of the police. Since this is literally why the government exists according to social contract theory (which the US was founded upon), the refusal of the government's police to do their job or the choice of the government's police to oppress others out of boredom is a breach of the social contract that makes said government illegitimate and no better morally than a street gang or mafia.
Even if the laws are vague, enforcing a vague law in a way that is clearly evil and oppressive is unacceptable because the core principle of the American legal system is that our fundamental rights are the supreme law and supersede any laws that infringe upon them. The right to walk on a public street is clearly protected by the 9th Amendment as it is so obviously a basic right that there was no need for the 1st Congress to enumerate it. Thus infringing on such a right in the name of "safety" is flagrantly unconstitutional.
This sort of thing is on every American parent’s radar. There’s a mild concern that some overeager police officer, or concerned citizen is going to decide that you’re not parenting correctly. At the top of the list of things to avoid is being noticed by the state.
I understand why child protection services exist, but it freaks me out that someone can arbitrarily decide that my wife and I aren’t good enough parents and take my kids.
There's a lot of criticism in this post of CPS (not just in the US), with comments like "they do more harm than good", etc.
As someone who was fostered and ultimately adopted, I want to reject the characterization that CPS is a useless organization - they are typically made up of underpaid people who genuinely care about the welfare of children.
Before dismissing them think about what kind of organization would you create to handle the distressingly common scenario of a drunk/drugged parent doing terrible things to themselves and their children in the middle of the night. CPS shows up in this case and takes care of the children. That is a routine event that doesn't make the news, it probably happened in your city last night. An insane response like TFA describes cannot be defended, but that is not the typical case at all.
They did not endanger their kids, the illegally dared to argue with the police. That level of arrogance is not tolerated by our betters in the elevated class of police officers. If they had simply apologized, thanked the officers and perhaps knelt before them there would have been no problem. /S
This is what happens when you create an insane concept like qualified immunity and give it to people that have absolute power. Society treats cops like they are a special privileged class so they act like it and treat everyone else like serfs.
I let my 11 year old ride his bike to 7-11 the other day for the first time. I can't imagine how I would react if the gestapo showed up telling me I was a bad parent and endangering my child. I would absolutely sue if they arrested me for it, especially after threatening my wife as in the article and then dropping charges.
For whatever reason, our society has confused well-being with safety. Those are not one and the same.
There will be a time when an adult has to assess risks and opportunity, and make choices. There are things in one’s life where they have to face the unknown and decide actions without having safety nets. A life cowering from the possibilities is small, with the illusion of safety.
And that’s for navigating one’s own life. What happens when these risk-adverse kids are raising their own kids?
What happen when these kids are the adults who have to vote and make decisions on things that affect the whole society?
As a European "The Land of the Free" is the funniest contradiction I've ever seen. As a teenager and young adult I loved to visit the US (NYC & LA) and everything seemed amazing. These days, I avoid the USA like I avoid North Korea and Russia. Of course, we have also huge problems here, but we seem to be more aware of them. And that helps immensely to bring about improvements.
That label was invented hundreds of years ago when the unincorporated land here was larger than continental Europe. But it's a different story now, the gas has expanded to fill all available space and there is no more freedom.
> "They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'"
It's even worse. There are paranoid conspiracy theorists roaming the streets of Killingly, armed to the teeth. You can recognize them by the blue uniforms.
Also, sorry to reply to my own comment, but "drug dealers are going to give your kids drugs" is a trope dating back to the "Just Say No" days of the 1980s. It was bullshit then, and it's bullshit now. Kids have no money, and they have no idea that drugs are supposed to be kept discreet, so they're likely to tell the first authority figure they see.
Absolutely. The problem is the sane individuals don't become police. The ones convinced the quiet suburb is an evil dangerous place in need of constant vigilance do.
It reminded me of when I was about 9 my younger brother and I were allowed to ride our bikes from our house 3.5 miles to the corner store, crossing under the freeway. We went many times during the summer. For several years. We read comic books, bought candy and soda pop and had a great time.
My folks were are conservative and taught us the value of hard work. I did plenty of it growing up. It is how we had the money for the comic books and junk food. During that time period I also remember hearing of someone who was murdered and the body was dumped in a ditch on a road about a mile away as the crow flies. There were rapists nearby and children stolen only a few miles away in the next town. I am sure my mom was worried and perhaps my dad too. I remember my dad looking at my little brother once and asking him what do you do if someone tries to take you? He said, "I fight and scream as loud as I can!" He would do it too. He was a scrapper. There is a reason my dad asked him and not me. He knew the response he would get. My parents are conservative Christians. They knew they couldn't protect us everywhere, all the time. I am sure they were praying about it often as we spread our wings and gradually flew out of the nest.
I've been to Killingly several times and find it completely non-credible that it's unsafe for kids to walk there.
The raw number of sex offenders / violent crime rates don't tell us much about the safety of a kid walking in a particular neighborhood at a particular point in time.
Additionally, I'm not sure how arresting a kid's parents is supposed to make anyone safer...
Indeed. I had a friend in college from Gary, Indiana which at the time was perennially near the top of the homicides per-capita lists. He said that he learned at a young age which neighborhoods to avoid and felt generally safe in the "good parts" of town.
Not sure how you can look at that second link and conclude it has a "substantial" amount of violent crime. The overall crime rate, and the violent crime rate, are both rated at "A-" levels, which is on the good end of the scale, not the bad end.
I mean, ffs, this is from the link:
"By a simple count ignoring population, more crimes occur in the northwest parts of East Killingly, CT: about 0 per year. The north part of East Killingly has fewer cases of violent crime with only 0 in a typical year."
The all story is a scary tale about the state's intromission on people's lives.
But this part is a constant reminder of how misandric present society is:
"...the officers proceeded to charge Rivers' husband with risk of injury to a minor. They charged Rivers separately for the same thing. Then they arrested her husband and took him away."
Time for some local press coverage on the topic of "why is Killingly so dangerous for children?" with plenty of "the department denied this when asked, but multiple officers spoke to us off the record about the dangers of the town and advised never leaving children unsupervised."
Not claiming it's not true, but according to the article, the author is "president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement".
So could the story have been embellished or made up to push a narrative and stir upset and outrage to get exposure? There doesn't seem to be any authoritative third-party evidence (public records) supporting this story.
I was sceptical reading it but I found the smoking gun to be the following: "she waited three years to let her go for another walk unsupervised". So not only is it anonymised with no information from police/social, but it's supposedly also a several years old case which makes it nearly impossible to verify. But I guess it will get people going.
If you want to make the connection, the less accusative, more simple interpretation is that because of their activism with Let Grow, they have the energy and commitment to actually push this story. Most people would just eat the humiliation and harassment to avoid more trouble.
Heh. I grew up in a town nearly identical to the one mentioned in the article (not far, either - probably only a 45 minute drive).
My bus stop was like a half mile/three quarters of a mile away so in the mornings my dad would drop me off on his way into work. One morning I realized we made it too late, and I had missed the bus.
On the walk home I got approached by a police officer who pulled up next to me. Thankfully, we had some history as he was my DARE officer in fifth grade.
He told me 3 different people called the police about a 15 year old walking by himself with a bag and large jacket on. People can never resist being busybodies.
These comments are mainly condemning the police. While they are definitely at fault here, so is society in the US as a whole. It's become pretty common in the states to not allow children to go outside without supervision. You just don't see kids biking down the road alone anymore. These cops have taken it too far, and made up reasons to arrest the parents, but in general the idea of children having any sort of freedom or responsibility is pretty much dead in this country.
Haha, what did America become! Country built by pioneers venturing into unknown danger, the whole ethos of the country is "exploration and endeavor". Now, one would be questioned for having kids outside.
As a parent, I feel for them and this is definitely a situation where cops overstepped their bounds.
To play devil's advocate: I am wondering if we have created a system where the cost of being wrong is too high. Imagine what would happen if the police didn't investigate and something had gone wrong? Or look at Gabby Petito's parents who are trying to sue the Moab police.
Yeah, I do think we’ve overstepped on what we expect police to do for us. It might also correlate with the seemingly endless stories of police overstep and abuse.
When I was six years old, my best friend and I rode our bicycle 2 miles to RadioShack. On the way back, his grandmother found us and said go home! So we did. No one got arrested.
Your parents should start suing. The people who are reporting this kind of crap. Custodial interference, I don't know I'm not a lawyer, but maybe a lawsuit will teach people to mind their own business.
If you ever had to volunteer at a school, and have to go through all the trainings, you can see how this nonsense can happen. The message is when you see something even remotely suspicious, report it. And all reports have to be followed up on. Because God forbid something bad happens to a kid, you will be blamed for not reporting or following up on something.
It is interesting that parents are not granted the autonomy to make these decisions by the law.
If the police have such a great concern about the safety in the neighborhood to the degree that children can't be outside someone has failed at their job.
Arresting people for letting their kids walk outside just to spread fear is shameful.
Interesting way for the local PD to say they are incompetent. Sorry, but the streets aren't safe for your children but here are two cruisers full of cops to explain parenting to you.
I grew up in Connecticut. Killingly is not an unsafe area by any stretch of the imagination. It’s quaint by all my measures.
This is absurd. I’d have been very quick to retort to the officers, upon being informed that there were sex offenders all throughout the neighborhood, that it was their job to fix that and they failed.
The amount of power CPS has in our state is somewhat unbelievable. A friend documented on instagram how during an X-ray of their daughters arm (as she had complained about a dull pain) that they found that she had at one point fractured it. She was 4 when she finally verbalized the discomfort but the injury was probably when she was 2. Her parents explained they didn’t know how it happened and like most parents of 2 years old know it’s sometimes impossible to know why your child is upset unless you see them injured.
CPS came later that evening and took both of their kids. The parents being Mormon had no drug or substance abuse issues, but her mom mentioned she was on antidepressants and the state decided to put them into a 1-year foster care for both of their kids until she an complete a mandated psych review.
Any reasonable person can see that there's much greater danger in allowing a child to ride in a car on a highway--which no doubt would be considered perfectly acceptable by these police. Look at this visualization of cause of death by age: https://wisqars.cdc.gov/data/lcd/home. For those kids, the number one cause of death is "unintentional injury," the biggest component of which is motor vehicle crashes. Unfortunately, these police wield incredible power in our legal system, and, as a lawyer, I don't see any easy fix. It makes me sad that I'll be raising my child in this kind of environment.
Not related to kids but while living in Singapore. My friend and I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment block, most apartments have a gate on them, and in 2 years we had over a dozen visits from neighbours and police because different families were ringing up our neighbours or the police to tell them our door was open (even tho the gate was closed and locked, we just wanted fresh air).
While living in Australia I used to have our front desk remind me to not leave the door open on the deck because “your annoying neighbour keeps calling us to say you left the door open while you were at work”.
I don’t know why people can be so… annoying like that. Like they just sit in their window looking for things to complain about.
Not super interesting and not quite the same thing, but as a teen multiple different parents would not let us walk to local shops or events, insisting on driving us. The reason were the "cops would pick us up" if we were walking somewhere without an adult as teens.
There’s a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It talks about play grounds safety, cancel culture, and many of the topics covered in this article and thread. It tried to use data to back up its claims and identify the causes for America’s shifting mindset. One interesting takeaway from the book was how the creation of the Americas Most Wanted tv show may be responsible for some of todays parental fears. However, statistically this is the safest time to be an American child. I recommend the book to everyone, but especially parents.
What does the richest do in this situation? Surely some must feel the need for their kids to venture out on their own, or do they live in a neighborhood where these types of policing doesn't happen?
Yeah, it’s not even a question regarding the richest, but change it to upper middle class families with busy and reasonably wealthy parents living somewhere in dense urban NYC downtown and it’s interesting how they go about it.
This is how I grew up (well, not wealthy, but a dense, residential neighborhood in Manhattan): it was perfectly normal for me to walk around and take the subway alone by the time I was 8 or so. I don’t remember ever being stopped by anyone, police or otherwise. This was in the early-mid 2000s, and my perception is that it hasn’t changed much in the city.
These aren't real numbers. But as someone over a certain age, I always say that during my childhood, you had about a 99.99 chance of surviving it to adulthood (discounting unpreventable causes such as inherited defects). And I know of at least one child who did perish in an incident which back then was a mere tragedy, but might today be considered criminal negligence (lack of supervision) by adults.
I believe that today's society, at least in North America, has added at least one nine to this statistic. Wonderful! For every 100,000 kids born, nine deaths prevented. That's a measurable success. But the reduction in "childhood experience" - the free roaming - for example, when as kids we received - and this dates me - our first 3-channel CB walkie talkies, with all their glorious 100mW of transmit power, 3 channel switch but only one set of crystals installed (channel 14) - it was completely natural that we'd fan out all over the countryside, testing the range - including a relay on a hilltop when we found that schoolmates had compatible walkie-talkies too.
But more seriously. Kids that can socialize unsupervised learn by experience how social structures are established, how to act responsibly and the consequences of not doing so and so forth, and also that the majority of people are good, nice folks who'll let you use your phone or have a glass of water or whatever. Now, instead, it's drilled into them that the world is a bad place and safety is at home with your gadgets.
Fun fact: The German foreign office warns about these kind of laws on its travel information page for the USA. Most European parents would not expect this to be a problem.
On an actuarial basis, how likely are children of this age group walking to a store in the suburbs likely to be a) approached by sex offenders trying to abuse them and b) either kidnapped or abused by strangers after being approached? My hunch is that being exposed to a small amount of anecdata warps our perception of these types of problems, and police are not immune from this type of bias. Although I could also be wrong on this hunch.
Isn’t the vast vast vast amount of abuse from people who know the victim, including when it’s kids? Aka I agree with your hunch. Most of this is boogie man panics.
We had some of the deadliest snakes in the world, slithering through our backyard (mambas, gaboon vipers, cobras, etc. -Nigeria, in the 60s), and we had brown scorpions, scuttling around the schoolyard, in Morocco.
I have had the … pleasure … of a rabies vaccination series, because of rabid rodents.
I used to pass a police fort, with a .50 caliber machine gun pointed at me (Uganda, in the early 70s -fun times), on my way to the candy store.
"Arrested for child endangerment", and the mug shot will stay in his record forever. Also fingerprints and possibly DNA record in the database forever.
Last time around, we were told the story of Heather Wallace, a Waco, Texas woman who was arrested after her child walked home. That Reason.com article stated that Wallace’s child, Aiden, had “agreed to walk home,” after which Wallace was arrested for child engagement.
I am a reporter and I cover crime. I was skeptical of that story, so I contacted the McClennan County Clerk of Court, and I paid for a copy of Ms. Wallace’s indictment.
It stated that Wallace had forced her crying child to walk home — on the shoulder of a busy highway.
I have no doubt that Heather Wallace told the article’s author (who runs an advocacy organization…) that her son Aiden wanted to walk home, but that is not what Aiden had told the police.
Wallace pleaded guilty.
Government overreach can be a serious problem, but I would be very hesitant to draw that conclusion from any story by this author. Particularly this one, since you can’t independently verify the facts. If you are going to credibly report stories about crime, you can’t anonymize the names of people who were allegedly arrested. That is not journalism. It’s storytelling.
This kinda reeks of /r/thathappened. Why is this posted 4 years after the fact with no sources? It's just a personal story being relayed by an advocacy group. I see kids roaming the streets of NYC and even riding the subway unsupervised and nobody says anything. This is either an isolated case or being reported by biased party who is omitting a lot of salient details to avoid looking bad.
This is really bad and I'm generally a pretty politically minded person, but is there a policy for what is and isn't discussed on hacker news? This one seems completely unrelated to technology.
I don't mind talking about politics in circles such as this but it seems a bit arbitrary that this particular news story blew up on HN. Does anybody know / could speculate why?
I saw this article the other day and thought it was odd that it doesn't mention how far away the Dunkin is. It does say the cops picked up the kids two blocks from their house, but it doesn't say how far the destination was. Seems kind of relevant, and it's usually mentioned in Reason pieces like this. Does anyone know the details of the distance or route?
I am really curious if we had an up or down vote whether people would pass a law saying that everyone 12 and under must be supervised. I think it would pass.
I certainly wasn't permitted to walk anywhere by myself at that age, nor were any of the non-immigrant friends that I know. My sister wasn't permitted to do that until around 15.
As a boy in the early 80s age 10 in an American suburb, I rode my bike to school one mile and back. It was fairly safe.
I also walked half a mile to a school bus stop when I was 12 and waited there (on a pretty busy street - not sure if that makes it safer or more dangerous but I would guess actually safer.)
I don't think the risks were high then, nor are they now. But the culture of what is considered acceptable for your kids to do by themselves outside the home is definitely way different.
If I had to pick one factor that is different and driving the difference, I think it's that the society now keeps (public) databases of where sexual offenders live so the awareness of the threat is much more concrete, even if it is not particularly elevated. We are over-managing/weighting what we can measure.
But also feeding the changing dynamic is bureaucracy and funding and legislation reflecting both the wealth and fears of our society -- today I learned) Child Protective Services wasn't really created until certain 1974 federal funding was given to the states, and other legislation around this didn't come till the 1988 Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption, and Family Services Act.
"They told us that it wasn't safe for kids to walk down the street, that there are registered sex offenders all over town that could take them, that drug dealers were going to give them drugs, and that it was 'a different world now,'"
Isn't it your job to protect people from all that?
I live near this area and am very familiar with the exact DD location in question. Obviously arresting the parents was a huge overreaction but the one thing I will say in defense of the police is the roads in this area are not pedestrian friendly at all. Portions of the road in question are 4 lanes including highway on/off ramps and dozens of businesses driveways and parking lots. Sections of the road have sidewalks that abruptly end and turn into guardrails forcing people to walk on the shoulder 1ft away from traffic moving at 45-60mph. I rarely see people walking these roads and as a result drivers are certainly less likely to be watching out for pedestrians. If I had kid I would not let them walk these roads. I would be on very high alert walking them myself as an adult.
I lived in Killingly for some years. You probably are thinking of the wrong Dunkin. The article states they live near the Troop D barracks, so it's not the Dunkins in Killingly Commons, and the Dunkin closest to the troop D barracks is not on a difficult road at all. It's quite possible the children did not have to cross any main roads to get there.
If it's the Dunkins in Killingly Commons, I'd agree, that's tough to get to on foot and that intersection is awful.
You've crossed into harassing that other user. This is not ok. Even supposing that they posted something lame, that's just how internet forums work. What you're doing here is aggressive and uncool, so please stop.
This particular incident has been recycled often enough that it actually makes me feel a little better about policing when I read it again. I keep wondering 'oh shit, is this becoming a thing now?' and then I see 'no, it's the same one as last time.'
As a non-USian, this headline made me think "What?! They are literally policing unhealthy food choices?!" The fact that it's about just letting kids walk to a nearby store is so much more mind boggling, it did not occur to me at all.
Literal police state. My elderly parents recently had police in their upper middle class neighborhood start POUNDING on their door at 3am. What was the cause? Had they caught someone breaking into their house? Was their house on fire? No.
They had left their garage door open over night, and the "kind" police officers decided to nearly give my father a heart attack to let him know that leaving open your garage door could draw in a "criminal element"
I don't want to live anywhere where police can feel "empowered" to terrorize regular people because of "crime" that may or may not be happening.
Edit: that was the RSS title; the webpage title is "US police: is a lack of training behind the violence? // Officers require fewer hours to qualify than plumbers and cosmetologists". Which again elicits a reaction in the lines of: "suspicion of that correlation being causal is the farthest from novel".
Surprise surprise, the cops are on a power trip again. You want to avoid this? Good luck. Your best bet is to move to the middle of nowhere where there are 4 police officers and they mainly care about joyriders.
My young (5-10 y/o) in-laws can walk around town with no worries, since the cops know who they are, and it's a tiny town. One of the few artifacts of normal life left in this country.
Oh yeah, and "Posted" signs carry force of law here, unbreakable by police or even federal agents without a warrant. They also know better than to try.
I used to walk or ride my bike to Dunkin Donuts at that age and it's likely farther than the one in this story. I imagine the officers are DCF workers will bear no accountability for this.
First, I don't take anything in Reason magazine at face value, because the pieces I've seen have always seemed published for appeal and to convey a "we are the people of 'reason'" image, rather than the issue itself.
That said, assuming at least partial truth to this article, I hope the kids didn't see their parent arrested, and weren't interrogated by anyone. I'd find a really gentle Mr. Rogers-type counselor to help talk with them about it.
Reason, like most outlets, is mostly untrustworthy in what they choose to cover: they're not going to put time into writing a piece about something that happened unless they can tie it back to their preferred policies. But, like most outlets, what they write about each particular instance is technically true and usually not misleading.
The most worrisome part of about this is the amount of power we give young clueless social workers who usually have never actually parented a child. Many of whom have never been in real relationships. All their knowledge comes from college classes dealing in theory. Same exact thing can be said about teachers.
There should be very serious pushback against allowing people like that near any levers of power.
What a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. If we want to fix policing in the US we need to do three things immediately:
1. Revoke qualified immunity
2. Educational requirements beyond a HS diploma
3. Internal Affairs should not be managed by the people they're investigating, it should be a citizen led committee that has no involvement with the department but can fire officers at will pending an actual investigation.
Revoking qualified immunity just seems like the wrong solution. It seems impossible for a police officer to do their job for 20 years without once having a situation where the preponderance of the evidence could suggest that there are grounds for damages.
Sorry, it's not. We need to hold police to higher standards, not the lowest. If these people can't do the job make way for people that can. Look at airline pilots. We hold them to the highest of standards and because of that air travel is safe. Police are seemingly drunk with power, which enables the situations we're seeing now. The Tyre Nichols murder highlights just how above the law these people see themselves as being.
> If these people can't do the job make way for people that can
Because more qualified people are lining up to become cops? Making it easier to sue cops is going to make it harder to find qualified people who are willing to join departments, not easier.
> The Tyre Nichols murder highlights just how above the law these people see themselves as being.
And it looks like they are about to find out just how not above-the-law they really are.
20 years ago I might have agreed with revoking qualified immunity, because AGs weren't willing to indict and juries weren't willing to convict cops. I am cautiously optimistic that we have turned a corner here, and if the trend continues the culture will have to shift.
Whenever I hear a story about a police encounter that went sour (which is often) I have to remind myself that this is probably pure sensationalism.
In the US about 30 million adults have a police initialed encounter per year[1]. It seems obvious to me that the vast, vast majority of these encounters end in the way common-sense would dictate, and that only very few have the shocking, blood-boiling finale that can make you angry enough to demand reform. But equally obvious is that these are the exact stories that are attention grabbing and therefor news worthy (at least in the click-through sense). I remind myself of this prevalence perception skewing effect that the news has whenever I read it and I try to actively resist it.
This reminds me of an 20yo comedy skit (that probably wouldn't be made today) by Chris Rock called "How not to get your ass kicked by the police!" which seems to say the same thing. [2]
Of course I might be mistaken. I wonder if people here have data to prove otherwise?
> I found out later from my husband that after I went inside, the arresting officer said to him, 'If she talks to me again, I'm going to arrest you both and take away your kids.'"
Wow. That person definitely deserves to never be in a position of power again. Abuse like this is insane.
If the cops come over and tell me "it's a different world now" and the streets are not safe for kids I'll ask them what they're doing about it because they're obviously neglecting their duties :P
Yes I'm sure I'd find myself in the back of a squad car like this dad. But it's worth it
Grew up in a small town in Connecticut and roamed around all the time as a ~9 year old. Used to go fishing with my friends at the various rivers and streams around town. No cell phones, be home before dark. Doors were never locked. It was a great way to grow up.
If the police are empowered to arrest you and child services is empowered to take action against your family, there needs to be a clear declaration of safe harbor.
We don't want there to be a whitelist of things we are allowed to do, with anything not on that list assumed to be against the law. That's a bad direction to go down. The right response to this situation would be to apologize to the parents, and punish the police and social worker who overstepped their authority.
We have quite a few. Applying them correctly and equitably is a challenge, which is what leads to situations like this one. But, it's miles better than the alternative.
I think the overwhelming majority believes it's okay for 17yo children to roam free but not 17mo toddlers. Even if the gray area in between can't be made zero-width, I'd like it to be smaller.
> When Rivers revealed that she had received therapy for depression some years before, the caseworker weaponized this information—and insisted she return to therapy.
Why are we "normalizing therapy" if nothing has changed about it being used against you?
I used to fly over to the US for work a lot, and even though I was usually in California, and got what I presume is a rather mild version of what you might run into elsewhere, seeing US TV was always a bizarre experience. It was like entering another dimension where every minor little thing was amplified ten times over.
Makes it seem even more bizarre that Americans aren't out in the streets rioting on a much more regular basis.
Let's be honest its a terribly lucrative business model that is spreading. Look at BFM TV, or worse, CNews, in France and tell me whats the difference between those and FoxNews?
My sister had the police called when her school age kids were playing/riding scooters in her front yard and driveway. In that case though, the police were just as confused as she was.
In my hometown of Easton, CT, the cops were the sex offenders on my block. I never reported it. The first half of this story makes me wonder how common that is in CT.
it's like paying taxes. even when able to afford them - effort, struggle, time, irrational fear. whole thing suddenly requires so much that it's just not worth it and you end up sailing to thepiratebay
Some of those who work forces, are the same that burn crosses
Every American should understand that the police are not your friends. They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about. A seven and nine year-old walking together to Dunkin' Donuts resulting the in the arrest of their father is a symptom of our police state. The fact that neighbors can "sic the law" on one another and the fact that "swatting" has become a verb is a symptom of our police state.
Getting back to this story and adding my own "get off my lawn" anecdote, when I was a kid every kid in the neighborhood walked to school. Even the five year-old kindergartners, like I was at one time. Oh sure my mom walked me the first couple of times to ensure I knew the route and that was it. Some kids had to walk two miles! We didn't even get a break for inclement weather! We had to walk in rain, snow and ice. We also had to cross a four-lane arterial thoroughfare! The horrors! And all this was in a big city! In all those years not a single kid was grabbed.
The trouble with "The police aren't your friends" crowd is they always seem to think the the police's boss is their friend when in reality, the government isn't your friend in general and the police are merely the enforcement arm of said government. Elect the same people for 50 years and let them get away with blaming their underlings if you want, but you are just being a useful idiot. The much lauded "social services" also played a role in making this happen, so "defunding the police" probably results in exactly the same outcome.
"The government" isn't a monolith, and I'd argue it largely isn't "the police's boss."
For instance, the NYPD leaked Mayor Bill de Blasio's daughter's arrest information, in a move that was widely criticized as an attempt at intimidation.
There's a great documentary about war from the 80s or 90s, and I remember a quote from it about how in an all volunteer military, soldiers are afforded special privileges in society. I think police in the US basically function in the same way.
The government isn't a monolith but the tens of thousands of police departments, containing what, tens of millions of officers are?
Here are the facts, a large proportion, if not the vast majority of violent police interaction in the United States is a direct result of the war on drugs. The people who voted those laws in are currently still in power, one is the president, and generally they blame the police for this state of affairs while making no effort to correct their lethal mistake. How many young men would run or resist arrest if that bag in their backpack resulted in a small fine vs a few decades in prison like today?
>The government isn't a monolith but the tens of thousands of police departments, containing what, tens of millions of officers are?
I think the metaphor "the government is the boss of the police" is not very accurate. The police are a political force that receives a huge % of most municipal budgets, with their own PR team/media relations, etc.
I oppose the war on drugs. However, I don't think decriminalization of all drugs solves this issue.
We could say the same thing about the armed forces or teachers. I would agree if we were to call them factions within a larger entity, they certainly are distinct enough from one another, there is some degree of infighting, but I feel that in general a member of the governmental caste feels greater affinity for other caste members than they do the public at large, and that is why it makes sense to look at them as a single unit. At the end of the day, individual police officers aren't elected, the only form of redress we really have in our system is the remove the leadership that allows these things to happen, we haven't done that and nothing has changed, that shouldn't be surprising.
If you reference my comment in this same GP thread I completely agree with you. If you want to take control of a local society, you need a cast of hitmen willing to do what you want. Conversely, if you try to take control of a local society and you don't have a cast of hitmen willing to do what you want, you will not gain control.
> Every American should understand that the police are not your friends.
But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average. Don't let the evening news distort reality so much.
Also, in the interest of sharing anecdotal get off my lawn moments, all the kids in my neighborhood walk to school too, in 2023. All weather, all the time, safely, nobody calls the cops, nobody gets grabbed, it's fine. The world is in fact objectively safer than it was when I was growing up in the 80s. There's a good reason I don't routinely watch the news or read partisan political media.
The point of "police are not your friends", is you can't know which cop has a chip on their shoulder until its too late and you're three teeth short of a smile. The nature of policing and the logic behind "ACAB" is that because police don't keep their peers in line, you cannot trust any cop.
"One bad apple" has been corrupted just like "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps". The former cuts off "spoils the bunch", the latter being a satire for something obviously impossible.
My general approach is to be as polite as can be while saying virtually nothing. If the first words out of your mouth after getting pulled over are "AM I BEING DETAINED?!?" then the police are going to make you have a very bad day. My brother had to learn this the hard way, he learned that 'tactic' from reddit I think, and it got him face down on the pavement for what should have been a speeding ticket. Just stay calm and never say anything more than the most vague pleasantries. If they ask where I'm going then it's either "to home", "to work" or "to the store"; they aren't owed answers to these questions and reddit will tell you to sperg out and start ranting about your rights, but if you stay calm and pleasant albeit distant, then the police will be more inclined to treat you the same. But if you antagonize them within the bounds of the law, they'll step outside the law to get you back. You're just setting yourself up for failure in the common case when you follow popular internet advice about cops.
These are all symptoms of living in a police state. We've normalized this behavior so much while living in a police state that we no longer see it, much in the same way proverbial fish are unaware of water.
I completely agree. In this case, it's about the fish being aware that he's in the water and which direction the currents flow. If you don't know how the water flows, you'll get smashed against the reef.
Exactly the problem, yes. On a societal level it's a problem that we should strive to correct. But on an individual level on a case by case basis, it's the reality you have to protect yourself from.
Very good points. I've used this same strategy for decades and my interactions with the police have been nothing short of overwhelmingly positive. Of course, I remain wary at all times, maintain situational awareness, and always try to remember the police officer's name and badge in case I need to have redress later with their department or the court.
That may be true, but it's not actionable advice on an individual level.
I think there's a tendency, particularly on reddit, to let perfect be the enemy of good in situations like this. Reddit will tell people that if you're not white then there's nothing you can do to get better behavior from cops and that advice such as mine above is therefore invalid. Being black in America changes the baseline interaction you can expect on average, but I think my advice will still do most people more good than harm most of the time.
If you want to have a boring incident free traffic stop, the best you can do is play your role in such an exchange and hope the cop reciprocates. Conform to the pattern of a mundane traffic stop so that the cop falls into the same pattern. If instead you play the role of some sort of agitated sovereign citizen, the cops will almost certainly reciprocate. In the first case, nothing is ever guaranteed but in the second case a negative outcome of some sort is virtually certain.
BTW I think this advice applies generally to almost all encounters with strangers, not just cops. Superficial politeness is a superpower. It works on anyone from troublesome new neighbors, crazy threatening people you encounter on the street at night, even stiff indifferent bureaucrats. Superficial politeness gets better outcomes from almost everybody, most of the time.
All these terrible experiences people vent about the American police force largely have to do with the fact that it's completely underfunded and poorly trained. In the US the average time to become a police officer is around 600 hours, in Germany 3500 and Finland 5500 hours [0]. If you pay police officers a shitty wage and let them do long, strenuous shifts - the only people who sign up for that kind of job are those with some external motivator other than money. In the best case they wanna help their community out but in many cases it's power hungry people who feel empowered carrying a gun and stopping traffic at will. The solution to fight that is simple: Pay higher salaries, have more competition among the applicants and only select those that pass a thorough barrage of physical and psychological tests.
It's a bit strange to point to 4 officers spending hours "investigating" a nothingburger as being evidence they're underfunded and overworked.
I guarantee that if that family had their house broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen...one cop would have shown up hours later, told them it wasn't worth filing a report as "nothing ever comes of it anyway", and then ignored phone calls from them when they discovered they did, in fact, need a report for insurance.
40% of the town general fund in Uvalde went to the police department. A tiny town with nearly zero crime had a large police department geared up to the gills and a separate school police department...and it got them...a police department that stood around (with county police and a federal border patrol tactical team) while their children and teachers were slaughtered.
They're also not undertrained - most police get huge training budgets for all sorts of stuff. It's just stuff that is fucking useless. There's lots of time and money for SWAT, anti-terror, and drug operations training, and it's way sexier than training on how to handle a domestic violence case or sexual assault or home invasion.
Police budget for Berlin (similar in size to LA, at 3.5M inhabitants) is about [0] $2 billion per year - that's for a region with much lower salaries than the US. They employ more than twice the number of police officers (26k vs 12k in LA).
And that's comparing a well funded and prestigious police force in the US - the comparison would look much worse in some poorer cities.
Police officers in cities like Boston and New York can make well into 6 figures after overtime pay. They also can retire relatively young, with generous pensions. Their departments are also well-stocked with capable vehicles and equipment. Funding is not the issue in those cases.
The safety models of cities is just different from that of suburbs. If you live in a walkable urban area, there's safety in numbers. It's not uncommon to see children walking down the block to their corner store or going to school or whatever. If a random adult approaches a child, there are plenty of people around to see it, and if they call out for help it's very likely that someone will intervene. In the suburbs, it's a bit different. The safety model depends more on things being "normal" - people are suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. In a community where everyone drives their kids to wherever they need to go, seeing children walking down the street might be unusual enough to get someone to call the police. because they'd want other parents to do the same if their own children somehow escaped and started wandering the neighborhood. It all depends on the norms of the particular community.
Probst, J., Zahnd, W., & Breneman, C. (2019). Declines In Pediatric Mortality Fall Short For Rural US Children. In Health Affairs (Vol. 38, Issue 12, pp. 2069–2076). Health Affairs (Project Hope). https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00892
Interesting. I do wonder though if the environment is actually safer, or if kids in urban areas just stay inside more. (Aware of threats, the homeless, etc) I never lived in an urban area as a child, but can tell you that I was allowed to (and did) roam freely in the rural areas, the woods, etc.
I grew up in a rural area, small town in western PA. Woods existed, but you couldn't use them. Firstly, how could I get there? There were no sidewalks, and riding a bike anywhere on the road with all the hills and blind corners would be suicide. Any fields nearby were fenced off. Any woods nearby were forbidden by great big NO TRESPASSING notices every 50 feet, and I didn't put it past them to shoot a child for trespassing. Every other property had an unleashed dog waiting to pounce on you for getting within sniffing distance of the property line. Thus I spent all of my time indoors playing Civ 4. In my experience, rural areas are designed for cars and are populated by people who wish they didn't have neighbors.
Good response. Definitely had a different experience down in rural Tennessee. Lived in several different towns but always had access to the woods through some mechanism (friends house, neighbors land, etc) never had more than a half acre ourselves but sure spent most of my free time outside. I appreciate your point, but obviously, we are both just spewing anecdotes, which still makes me wonder which environment outside of the home is actually safer.
I don't know if it is because you were in a different area than I, or if it was because you grew up 20 years after I did (based on your Civ 4 comment. I was playing a lot of Ultima 3 in my day.) But my growing up in a rural area, small town in central MA, I spend almost all of my time outside, often in the woods. Nobody was going to shoot me for trespassing, as all us kids knew all the local farmers and land owners. We went to church with them, and we all pitched in at harvest times to help on the farms and make a few bucks to spend at the local general store, which we got to by riding our bikes through trails we'd made in the woods. And traffic on the roads was always pretty light, so we never much worried about getting hit.
Probst, J., Zahnd, W., & Breneman, C. (2019). Declines In Pediatric Mortality Fall Short For Rural US Children. In Health Affairs (Vol. 38, Issue 12, pp. 2069–2076). Health Affairs (Project Hope). https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00892
>They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about
So who are the police serving in this case? It's not like Big Karen(TM) has a trade group that hires lobbyists. It's not like The System(TM) really cares if your kids walk to wherever.
The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.
HN is angry because the morals enforced in this case are excessive and the amount of enforcement is disproportionate but the fact of the matter is that the person/people who's morals the cops are backing up with state violence is probably not that different from them.
> The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.
I don't think the problem is so much about them checking on the kids' family after being called by some neighbour (which is prob. legitimate to avoid any risk of neglect etc.).
As you said t he problem is that they arrested a parent who, for all intents and purposes, was complying with their questioning. In front of their children. And threatened the second parent with arrest. And taking away the children.
I don't see how you can make the jump from "response was disproportionate" to "commentators are not that different from the person who reported the incident" though.
>I don't see how you can make the jump from "response was disproportionate" to "commentators are not that different from the person who reported the incident" though.
The point is that the call didn't come in from one of the "more equal animals". Any one of us could have made the same call and got the same response. It's not like the cops were doing someone a favor by responding.
> They exist to "protect and serve" those in power
While this is technically correct, this phrase sets up a simplistic model of society where there's the Powerful on top, the Police right under them serving them, and the Oppressed under that. I don't think this is the best way to understand what the Police are and what they do.
I've heard many left-leaning people claim something along the lines of "the Police do whatever the Powerful want by taking it out on the Oppressed". This doesn't accurately reflect the behavior or mindset of the individuals who collectively make up the Police. There are thousands of stories of rich and "powerful" individuals being harassed by police officers when their actions or beliefs clashed with the beliefs of the responding officers.
In fact, in America the definition of "power" is almost tautological when it comes to police. You are a "powerful" person when the police will either look the other way or help you when you break the law. I would go as far as to say that in America it is impossible to be "powerful" unless you have the police on your side. (A possible exception is for gang leaders with their own outlaw police forces.) Without the police you do not have meaningful power, and so saying "the police exist to serve the powerful" incorrectly separates the relationship between the "Powerful" and the "Police".
The Police are the power. I like to call them the "Martial Caste", in order to draw connections between them, medieval knights, samurai, cartel sicarios, the KGB, etc. It's all the same thing: they are the muscle behind the societal ownership claims of the local warlords. Without them the warlords are nothing, and without the warlords they are nothing.
A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".
> A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".
Reminds me of this joke from the other day about the "system":
A CEO, a Politician, a Supreme Court justice, a Cop, a Laborer and an Immigrant are at a table. The table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies, and passes one cookie to the Politician's PAC. The Politician says to the Laborer "look out, the Immigrant is trying to take your cookie!" and allocates a few crumbs from the table cookie to the Cop. The Cop beats the Laborer and shoots the Immigrant. The Supreme Court justice rules that the PAC is legal, the shooting is justified, and the Cop has qualified immunity for beating the Laborer.
Yep, the police serve the themselves. The same can be said about basically every other group of humans. Police have significant power and leeway because the service has provides a lot of value to others.
I like your martial metaphor.
Poor and marginalized communities usually want more police, not less. Not because the police come at no cost, but because the alternative is worse.
It is like hiring one knight errant to keep other knights/bandits at bay.
This is basically the origin of all governments and power structure.
A few days later we get a knock on the door from our state’s version of DCF. Someone had complained that they didn’t like the way my wife had walked our daughter to the bathroom. After an interview the state worker said it sounded like retaliation for our son and his team doing so well, and all but hinted it was an opposing team’s parent who called in the complaint. Sadly the law says they have to investigate every complaint, no matter how trivial, so we had to go through a couple interviews and they apparently interviewed others as well.
Just annoying for us, but other workers have told us about horror stories (our kids are adopted and we got to know that arm of the agency well).
Obviously these agencies are vital, but they need well balanced laws and regulations and some common sense injected into them so stupid complaints don’t end up sucking up resources and potentially disrupting lives for nothing.